277,280 research outputs found
Visions and Challenges in Managing and Preserving Data to Measure Quality of Life
Health-related data analysis plays an important role in self-knowledge,
disease prevention, diagnosis, and quality of life assessment. With the advent
of data-driven solutions, a myriad of apps and Internet of Things (IoT) devices
(wearables, home-medical sensors, etc) facilitates data collection and provide
cloud storage with a central administration. More recently, blockchain and
other distributed ledgers became available as alternative storage options based
on decentralised organisation systems. We bring attention to the human data
bleeding problem and argue that neither centralised nor decentralised system
organisations are a magic bullet for data-driven innovation if individual,
community and societal values are ignored. The motivation for this position
paper is to elaborate on strategies to protect privacy as well as to encourage
data sharing and support open data without requiring a complex access protocol
for researchers. Our main contribution is to outline the design of a
self-regulated Open Health Archive (OHA) system with focus on quality of life
(QoL) data.Comment: DSS 2018: Data-Driven Self-Regulating System
Evaluating Drought Vulnerability of Small Community Surface Water Supply Systems in the Midwest
This report presents approaches and data availability for evaluating the drought
vulnerability of small community water supply systems in the Midwest that obtain water from
surface water bodies, such as rivers, streams, natural lakes, and man-made reservoirs. A
description is provided of the various types of surface water sources from which 320 small
community systems in the Midwest, each serving 10,000 or fewer people, obtain their water.
The small community surface water system most commonly obtains its supply from one or two
small impounding reservoirs. However, a substantial number of communities instead obtain
their water from either direct river withdrawals or off-channel storage of water withdrawn from
streams and rivers. Sixty of these 320 small community surface water systems were interviewed
to gather information on the availability of data to determine the drought vulnerability of these
systems. Although hydrologic and physical data exist for evaluating many of these systems,
relatively few of the interviewed system managers could provide such pertinent information.
A summary of selected hydrologic data is provided that can be used to determine the
relative severity of major historical drought periods for various portions of the Midwest. Focus
is given to historical droughts and available data for the southern portion of the Midwest where
most surface water supply systems are located, comprising parts of Kansas, Missouri, Iowa,
Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Geographic differences in drought severity are described, as is the
influence of the physical characteristics of a water supply on the “critical” drought duration that
a community must consider.
Basic water budget analyses of water supplies and data needs are presented. Reservoir
capacity measurements and estimates of inflow are the most critical data in reliable assessment
of water supply adequacy. Depending on data availability, estimation of inflows may be
straightforward to highly uncertain. For water supply systems that withdraw directly from a
stream or river, the existence of long-term stream gage data on that river is particularly crucial to
evaluate supply adequacy, and such data for larger streams and rivers are often available. With
impounding reservoirs, which are typically located on smaller streams, data for that stream may
often not exist; however, data from a “surrogate” gage that is considered to be hydrologically
similar are often sufficient to estimate water supply yield. Systems that use off-channel
reservoirs often withdraw water from smaller streams that do not have data for accurate depiction
of their yield, and these systems also appear to be the most vulnerable to severe drought
conditions. Case studies are presented to provide examples of yield calculations and innovative
approaches that selected small communities have undertaken for addressing drought
vulnerability. The role of demand management (drought response and water conservation) in
evaluating drought vulnerability is also presented.
If hydrologic data and basic physical data such as storage capacity are lacking, it may be
difficult for either system managers or experienced professionals to estimate a community
system’s yield and potential drought impacts, particularly for off-channel reservoir and low
channel dam systems. However, managers should attempt to understand the type of drought
period likely to test the adequacy of the available supply and can begin recording basic system
observations, such as daily withdrawal records and reservoir drawdown, in a readily-accessible
form that will be useful for future evaluations.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe
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