Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 2, numbers 2 and 3, 2009 // View article

Web Services Solutions for Hydrologic Data Access and Cross-Domain Interoperability

Authors:
Bora Beran
Simon Jonathan David Cox
David Valentine
Ilya Zaslavsky
John McGee

Keywords: Webservices; interoperability; international standards; geosciences; hydrology

Abstract:
Agencies such as US Geological Survey (USGS), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offer considerable amount of data on climate, hydrometry and water quality in the United S tates spanning from 1860s to the current day. While accessible through a web browser, data from these sources typically cannot be directly ingested by modeling or analysis tools without human intervention. Different input/output formats, syntax and terminology, and different analysis scenarios the systems were designed to support, make data discovery and retrieval a major time sink. This paper examines the web services developed as a part of Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS) project as a means to standardize access to hydrologic data repositories, facilitate data discovery and enable direct machine-to-machine communication, and the efforts in larger scale to create a standard which is more flexible and generic yet capable of capturing the domain semantics such that interoperability with other scientific domains can be achieved losslessly.

Pages: 317 to 324

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2009. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 1, 2009

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2679