CUAHSI HYDROLOGIC INFORMATION SYSTEM: A SERVICES-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR TIME-SERIES DATA

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) has developed a services-oriented architecture for data publication, discovery, and transmission of time-series data collected at a fixed point called the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS). The use of standards by CUAHSI HIS, such as the WaterML 2.0 schema for transmitting time-series data, enables it to be easily adopted by multiple organizations and provides an approach of interoperability across disciplines. A large-scale prototype system has been developed in North America with more than 70 different services registered including universities, government agencies (such as USGS and US EPA), and local authorities (such as Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority, Ontario). This prototype illustrates the potential of such a system to advance collaborative research, resource assessment, and predictive modeling using data from multiple sources.