Levels Of Data Interoperability In The Emerging North American Groundwater Data Network

The Canadian Groundwater Information Network (GIN) and the US National Ground-Water Monitoring Network (NGWMN) connect data from a variety of sources including states, provinces and federal agencies. Data heterogeneity is a major challenge faced by these networks, one that must be overcome at five distinct levels: systems, syntax, structure, semantics, and pragmatics. This paper discusses approaches taken at each of the five levels to ensure interoperability between the Canadian and American networks. The result is an emerging North American Groundwater Data Network, which enables users to access data transparently and uniformly on either side of the shared border

The conceptual schema in geospatial data standard design with application to GroundWaterML2

Abstract The explosive growth of geospatial data has stimulated the development of many standards aimed at decreasing data heterogeneity and enhancing data use. Well-established design methods for geospatial data standards typically involve the creation of two schemas for data structure, designated here as logical and physical, but this can lead to conceptual inconsistencies and modelling inefficiencies. In this paper we describe a design method that overcomes these issues by incorporating an additional schema – the conceptual schema – and demonstrate its application to the design of GroundWaterML2 (GWML2), a new international standard for groundwater data. Results include not only a new data standard, robustly constructed and tested, but also an enhanced method for geospatial data standard design

Enabling global exchange of groundwater data : GroundWaterML2 (GWML2)

GWML2 is an international standard for the online exchange of groundwater data that addresses the problem of data heterogeneity. This problem makes groundwater data hard to find and use because the data are diversely structured and fragmented into numerous data silos. Overcoming data heterogeneity requires a common data format; however, until the development of GWML2, an appropriate international standard has been lacking. GWML2 represents key hydrogeological entities such as aquifers and water wells, as well as related measurements and groundwater flows. It is developed and tested by an international consortium of groundwater data providers from North America, Europe, and Australasia, and facilitates many forms of data exchange, information representation, and the development of online web portals and tools. © 2018, The Author(s)