David Maidment of the University of Texas at Austin will present "The Future of HydroInformatics for Managing Water," 3:30 p.m., Wednesday, Jan. 25, in the Hardin Hall auditorium. He is giving the Williams Memorial Lecture as part of the Spring 2012 Water Seminar Series, sponsored by the Water Center and the School of Natural Resources.
Abstract
The advent of the internet and tools that leverage its connectivity have led to global information sharing and human community forming on a scale that was unimaginable even ten years ago. Central to this development are the world-wide web protocols and the hypertext markup language that underlie the exchange of text, images and sound that we now take for granted. A similar trend is emerging in the exchange of water information. A new language called WaterML has been created to convey through the internet data observations of water variables such as discharge, groundwater levels, precipitation and water quality. It is likely this will become an international standard for water data exchange in 2012. The U.S. Geological Survey has built a backbone of water web services using WaterML for the United States, and water “hubs” and “catalogs” are being developed that synthesize observational information from many organizations into a single water information system for a local region, a state or a nation. This lecture will describe the underpinnings of this web services system for water information sharing and describe a new initiative called World Water Online designed to bring together geospatial and temporal water information for the whole earth.