HR: 15:25h
AN: IN53C-08 [Abstracts]
TI: Design and implementation of CUAHSI WaterML and WaterOneFlow Web Services
AU: * Valentine, D W
EM: valentin@sdsc.edu
AF: San Diego Supercomputer Center, 9500 Gliman Dr #0505
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037, United States
AU: Zaslavsky, I
EM: zaslavsk@sdsc.edu
AF: San Diego Supercomputer Center, 9500 Gliman Dr #0505
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037, United States
AU: Whitenack, T
EM: twhitenack@sdsc.edu
AF: San Diego Supercomputer Center, 9500 Gliman Dr #0505
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037, United States
AU: Maidment, D
EM: maidment@mail.utexas.edu
AF: Center for Research in Water Resources, Bldg 119, MC R8000
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, United States
AB:
WaterOneFlow is a term for a group of web services created by and for the Consortium of Universities for the
Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) community. CUAHSI web services facilitate the retrieval of
hydrologic observations information from online data sources using the SOAP protocol. CUAHSI Water Markup
Language (below referred to as WaterML) is an XML schema defining the format of messages returned by the
WaterOneFlow web services.
\newline
WaterML CONCEPTS
\newline
The goal of the first version of WaterML was to encode the semantics of hydrologic observations discovery and
retrieval and implement WaterOneFlow services in a way that creates the least barriers for adoption by the
hydrologic research community. In particular, this implied maintaining a single common representation for the
key constructs returned on web service calls, related to observations, features of interest, observation
procedures, observation series, etc.
In addition to point measurements described in the CUAHSI Observations Database Model (ODM) specification,
hydrologic information may be available as observations or model outcomes aggregated over user-defined
regions or grid cells. While USGS NWIS and EPA STORET exemplify the former case, sources such as MODIS
and Daymet are examples of the latter. In this latter case, as in the case of other remote sensing products or
model-generated grids, the observation or model-generated data are treated as fields, and sources of such data
are referenced in WaterML as datasets, as opposed to sites.
\newline
IMPLEMENTATION
\newline
WaterML is primarily designed for relaying fundamental hydrologic time series data and metadata between
clients and servers, and to be generic across different data providers. Different implementations of
WaterOneFlow services may add supplemental information to the content of messages. However, regardless of
whether or not a given WaterML document includes supplemental information, the client shall be sure that the
portion of WaterML pertaining to space, time, and variables will be consistent across any data source.
Depending on the type of information that the client requested, a WaterOneFlow web service will assemble the
appropriate XML elements into a WaterML response, and deliver that to the client. The core WaterOneFlow
methods include:
\newline
* GetSiteInfo – for requesting information about an observations site, and returns site properties, and observation
series for that site.
\newline
* GetVariableInfo – for requesting information about a variable, and returns variable properties.
\newline
* GetValues – for requesting a time series for a variable at a given site or spatial fragment of a dataset, and
returns data values, and associated variable and site properties to make a single self-contained request.
\newline
The CUAHSI WaterML description has been submitted as a discussion paper to the Open Geospatial
Consortium, and is available from the OGC portal. The project web site is http://www.cuahsi.org/his .
UR: http://www.cuahsi.org/his
DE: 1819 Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
DE: 6339 System design
DE: 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings)
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting