20 September 2012 – The OpenGeospatial Consortium (OGC®) has adopted the OGC WaterML 2.0 Part 1: TimeSeries Encoding Standard as an official OGC standard.

OGC WaterML 2.0 is an important new XML-based international standard forencoding and exchanging data describing the state and location of waterresources, both above and below the ground surface. WaterML 2.0 Time Series supportsencoding of hydrological and hydrogeological observation data in exchangescenarios such as:

 — Exchange of data foroperational monitoring and forecasting programs
 — Supporting infrastructureoperation (e.g. dams, supply systems)
 — Exchange of observational andforecast data for surface water and groundwater
 — Release of data for publicdissemination
 — Enhancing disaster managementthrough data exchange
 — Exchange in support ofnational reporting

The WaterML 2.0 Time Series work was supported through a waterinformation research and development alliance between the AustralianCommonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Water fora Healthy Country Flagship program and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.The work was also supported by the Consortium of Universities for theAdvancement of Hydrologic Science Hydrologic Information System (CUAHSI) andmany other organizations around the world. The following organizationssubmitted the candidate standard to the OGC membership for adoption:

 — Australian Bureau of Meteorology
 — CSIRO (Australia)
 — Deltares (Netherlands)
 — disy Informationssysteme GmbH (Germany)
 — Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute (Germany)
 — Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada
 — German Federal Institute of Hydrology
 — International Office For Water – Sandre (France)
 — KISTERS AG (Germany)
 — San Diego Supercomputer Center (US)
 — US Geological Survey
 — US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

Dr David Maidment of the Center for Research in Water Resources,University of Texas at Austin, and leader of CUAHSI, which developed WaterML1.0, said, “This is the first public, open source, global standard for theexchange of water information through the Internet. It is critical for linkinglocal, regional, national and global water information sources into connectedwater information networks throughout the earth.”

Australian Bureau of Meteorology Deputy Director ­ Climate and Water, Dr. Dasarath Jayasuriya, welcomed the announcement of WaterML 2.0. “Thisis a great outcome for the Water Information community. In Australia, WaterML 2.0will be used to guide development of the second version of the Water DataTransfer Format, which is designed to help the Australian water industry sharedata to the Bureau. This will enable the Bureau to efficiently ingest andprocess water data and provide it to the community in a timely manner. Usingthese standards will significantly improve the quality and comparability of thewater data the Bureau publishes,” Dr Jayasuriya said.

The WaterML 2.0 Time Series Encoding standard is implemented as anapplication schema of the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) EncodingStandard version 3.2.1 and encodes hydrologic semantics onto the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) model and encodingstandards. It is thus compatible with a wide variety of geospatial and sensorweb systems. It is the first exchange standard of a suite of informationstandards being developed by OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group to communicateand standardize services for exchanging hydrologic information.

The OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group is a Joint Working Group ofthe World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the OGC, involving hydrologicaland government agencies, software providers, universities and researchorganizations from Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA andother countries.

The OGC WaterML 2.0 Part 1: TimeSeries Encoding Standard documentis free and can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/waterml.

The OGC is aninternational consortium of more than 465 companies, government agencies,research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus processto develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards supportinteroperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless andlocation-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technologydevelopers to make geospatial information and services accessible and usefulwith any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGCwebsite at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

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