2023 | Geoconnex.us: a standards based framework to discover water data

FOSS4G 2023 Prizren

Presenters: Benjamin Webb & Tom Kralidis

The Web has an increasing number of web applications being developed to freely provide their information and is a hub for open data publishing. For this to happen as a self-sustained ecosystem, data must be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable to both humans and machines across the wider web. This session delves into Web Best Practices for publishing data using open source and standards-based solutions.

Implementation has two parts: persistently identified real world objects and organizational monitoring locations that collect data about them. Both must be published to the Web using persistent URIs and communicated with common linked data semantics in order for a knowledge graph to be constructed.

The Internet of Water Coalition supports the first part with a Permanent Identifier Service and reference hydrologic reference features (e.g. watersheds, monitoring locations, dams, bridges, etc.) within the US.

This spatial feature-based linked data architecture enables data interoperability between independent organizations who hold information about the same real world thing without centralizing data infrastructure - answering important questions like, “Who is collecting water data about my local stream and its tributaries?” or “What data do we have about water upstream and downstream of East Palestine, Pennsylvania?”