COMMUNITY TOOLS FOR DISCOVERY, ARCHIVAL, AND PUBLICATION OF WATER DATA AND INFORMATION

The array of water challenges requires an integrated multi-disciplinary research-community approach to understand and identify scientifically sound solutions and support information and data infrastructure that enables discovery, dissemination, and transparency. The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) was founded on the premise that big hydrologic science demands collaboration and integration of information from multiple sources to support advancements in hydrologic research and the infrastructure for community activities in the hydrologic sciences. CUAHSI has successfully built and maintained innovative and robust tools for data discovery, publication, storage, analysis, modeling, and collaboration, harnessing the data revolution. CUAHSI’s Water Data Services support discovery, publication, storage, and re-use of water data and models, as well as tools for collaboration, thereby promoting reproducible discovery in the water sciences through interdisciplinary collaboration. We currently employ two primary technologies developed in collaboration with our community members: the CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) and HydroShare. These domain-specific, open-source, interoperable technologies were developed based on community input from the hydrologic science research community. All CUAHSI’s software is open source and developed through an open process with community code repositories on GitHub [35] that facilitate community use of and contributions to this code. This presentation will focus on HydroShare, which is a platform for sharing hydrologic resources (data, models, model instances, geographic coverages, etc.), enabling the scientific community to more easily and freely share products resulting from their research, including the data, models, and workflow scripts used to create scientific publications. HydroShare also includes a variety of social functions, such as resource sharing within a specified group, the ability to comment on and rate resources, and support for integrating external applications to view and use resources without downloading them. HydroShare also has applications beyond the hydrologic sciences, as will be demonstrated.