There's a hole in my -- and in the data as well!

SDSC researchers use cyberinfrastructure to standardize water data collections

Like the popular children’s song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket,” in which Liza and Henry try to patch a leaking pail, researchers with the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego are plugging a hole in the data management process by creating a universally accepted cyberinfrastructure to study our most valuable natural resource — water.

The initiative, called the Hydrologic Information System (HIS), is supported by a 5-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to a team of researchers and software developers from five universities. The HIS project is being developed in close collaboration with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc., or CUAHSI (Pronounced ‘quasi’), it is a joint effort among more than 100 universities and funded by NSF to advance research in hydrology, or the science of water, its properties, distribution and circulation on and below the earth's surface and in the atmosphere.

Ilya Zaslavsky, director of SDSC’s Spatial Information Systems Laboratory and a key architect of HIS, points to the flood of data on water quality and quantity that’s collected daily via thousands of sensor stations through a multitude of agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“We’re drowning in data, but the problem is that most, if not all, of these databases are incompatible with each other,” said Zaslavsky. “Despite water being such a precious commodity and its conservation being such an important issue these days, researchers still don’t have an accurate assessment of just how much water we have as a nation.”

Developed by Zaslavsky and a team of researchers from around the country, HIS is currently in the first phases of forming a web-based cyberinfrastructure, or the interrelation of computing power, data services and academic expertise. SDSC is the technical partner in HIS, with the national supercomputer center contributing its expertise in web services, online serving of geospatial data, and development of cyberinfrastructure nodes. SDSC houses comprehensive observations catalogs referencing water data collections, and is also responsible for hosting project data and related services as well as the deployment of HIS applications.

HIS is designed to serve several functions. It facilitates broad and uniform user access to comprehensive distributed collections of water data from federal, state and local repositories, and lets users publish new observation datasets. HIS also provides a common information model and relational schema for storing hydrologic observations data, water data exchange protocols and web services, and a range of hydrologic controlled vocabularies.

Additionally, HIS is intended to better enable cross-scale analysis of hydrologic cycles and processes on either a regional or continental scale by linking with a range of climate models and integrating data from neighboring disciplines.