The National Groundwater Monitoring Network Data Portal: Innovation in Ground Water Data Exchange and Mediation

The need for national groundwater monitoring 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 groundwater management questions raised by Congress, Federal, State and Tribal agencies and the public.

The data portal is the means by which stakeholders are 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 portal facilitates the retrieval of and access to groundwater data on an as-needed basis from multiple, dispersed 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 Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) data exchange standards and information models. WaterML2.0, an evolving international standard for water observations, encodes groundwater levels and is exchanged using the OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) standard. Ground Water Markup Language (GWML) encodes well log information and is exchanged using the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) standard. Data exchange between distributed repositories is achieved through the use of these web service standards and a central hub. The hub performs format (syntactic), nomenclature (semantic) and eventually vocabulary (ontological) mediation, resolving heterogeneous inputs into common standards-based outputs and achieving interoperability among state and federal agencies nationally.