Global Drought Monitoring Service through the GEOSS Architecture ...

Architectural Implementation Pilot, Phase 3 Version: 2.0
Global Drought Monitoring and European Drought
Observatory-Water SBA Engineering Report
Date: 11/Feb/2011
The EuroGEOSS discovery broker component is based on GI-Cat software 51 .
8. Range of Issues Covered by the Water Working Group
The AIP-3 Call for Participation originally included Water Quality and Drought
(including Agricultural Drought). W. Sonntag and C. Spooner (USA Environmental Protection
Agency), V. Guidetti of the European Space Agency (ESA), and J. Lieberman joined to raise
water quality issues with regards to an EO2Heaven project to be based in Africa and beach
closures in the Gulf of Maine.
The CSIRO Tasmanian ICT Centre has developed the Hydrological Sensor Web (HSW)
based on OGC-SWE standards. Near real-time hydrologic observations and flow forecasting are
published and accessed through the OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS).
Fig. 18(a) shows the generation process of flow forecasting. Firstly, rainfall observations
are collected from different sensor sites, owned by different agencies, and stored in databases.
The observations are published on the HWS via SOS. A Kepler workflow obtains rainfall
observations from SOS and generates the gridded rainfall surface. A forecast model then
consumes the gridded rainfall data and produces flow forecasts. Finally, the forecasting results
are published onto the HSW through SOS. It can be seen that different agencies are involved in
producing flow forecasting results.
For this use case, a provenance information model has been developed which is demonstrated in
Fig. 18(b). Three sets of ontologies have been adopted, which are the Sensor Ontology, the
WaterML2 Ontology and the Process Ontology to describe information/ knowledge in the sensor
domain, the water domain and the data processing domain, respectively. Then, the Proof Markup
Language (PML) is used to describe the generation processes of information products and link
multi-domain ontologies together. This allows tracking the lifecycle of hydrologic data products,
as well as record-related factors that may impact on data qualities, e.g., sensor setting, model
calibration.
51 http://zeus.pin.uinfi.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/GIcat
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