Development of a Groundwater Data Portal for Interoperable Data Exchange and Mediation within the National Ground Water Monitoring Network

The need for national groundwater monitoring is profound and has been recognized by organizations outside government as a major data gap for managing groundwater resources. Our country's communities, industries, agriculture, energy production and critical ecosystems rely on water being available in adequate quantity and suitable quality. To meet this need the Subcommittee on Ground Water, established by the Federal Advisory Committee on Water Information, created a National Ground-Water Monitoring Network envisioned as a voluntary, integrated system of data collection, management and reporting that will provide the data needed to address present and future ground-water management questions raised by Congress, Federal, State and Tribal agencies and the public.

The Groundwater Data Portal is the means by which policy makers, academics and the public will be able to access groundwater data through one seamless web-based application from disparate data sources. Data systems in the United States exist at many organizational and geographic levels; however differing vocabulary and data structures have prevented data sharing and reuse. The data portal will facilitate the retrieval of and access to groundwater data on an as-needed basis from multiple, dispersed data repositories allowing the data to continue to be housed and managed by the data provider while being accessible for the purposes of the national monitoring network.

This work leverages the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) data exchange standards and existing XML schemas (WaterML2.0, GWML, WQX). Data exchange between disparate repositories and the portal has been achieved through the use of OGC web services and a central mediation hub, which performs both semantic and syntactic mediation of the raw data and outputs it in a single common format. This architecture allows for the presentation of ‘real-time’ data pulled and re-organized on the fly to be viewed in a common format through a web application.