A major component of the Water Census is the National Water Census Data Platform, which enables integration and delivery of water budget information alongside other data of interest to managers, such as water use data or ecological assessment criteria. Eventually, end users of water budget data (i.e. management agencies and decision-makers) will be able to access an integrated system of online databases in a form that will enable them to construct local and regional water budgets.
Summary
A major component of the Water Census is the National Water Census Data Platform, which enables integration and delivery of water budget information alongside other data of interest to managers, such as water use data or ecological assessment criteria. Eventually, end users of water budget data (i.e. management agencies and decision-makers) will be able to access an integrated system of online databases in a form that will enable them to construct local and regional water budgets.
A National Data Platform will enable stakeholders and other interested parties to explore and focus their data activities on areas and times of interest, offer appropriate filters to narrow their data retrieval, and make available other tools to fit their specific needs. The platform will follow the President?s Digital Government Strategy by using a rich set of Web services to provide underlying data. This strategy will allow any data system or interactive Web-based analytical service to leverage the Water Census data by making automated queries and retrievals from the data store. The National Data Platform will use Web services to create a comprehensive and nationally consistent interactive map interface and a set of trend-analysis and other tools that work directly with the data.
Data products from individual components of the water budget will be made available as stand-alone datasets to serve the specific needs of users who need information from particular portions of the data store. In addition, value-added and integrated data will be provided, removing the integra- tion effort from the user and promoting a uniform approach to combining datasets that may have originated in mixed scales and standards. It is critical that the sources and transformations of the data being served by the Water Census are fully documented and available with the data.
Serving Water Census data to users will involve the technology needed to mediate language and format issues that would otherwise make a Web-based delivery system inconsistent and non-intuitive. The approach planned for the National Data Platform will incorporate current technologies and best practices?such as searchable metadata catalogs, semantic services that facilitate the conceptual relation of data to other data, and format mediation to handle data translation and provide user-selected output types?allowing users to focus on the discovery, exploration, and retrieval of the data rather than on reconciling inconsistencies in the data served by the system.
