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The Australian Water Data Infrastructure Project
What is the Australian Water Data Infrastructure Project?
The objective of the Australian Water Data Infrastructure Project (AWDIP) is to facilitate Australia-wide assessments of water resources through ongoing development of a comprehensive and accessible water information framework. The AWDIP was established under the national component of the Natural Heritage Trust.
The AWDIP is a framework for a network of distributed hydrological databases. The framework will enable on-line access to State and Territory agencies hydrographic data sets representing Australia’s first distributed database of national natural resource management data.
Initially the AWDIP focussed on facilitating the reporting on water resources by the National Land and Water Resources Audit, specifically reporting on Water Quality Resource Condition Indicators under the National Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Framework Matters for Target. The needs of other potential users are emerging and once these are defined they will be addressed.
Sponsorship of the Water Data Theme
In 2003, following completion of the National Land and Water Resources Audit’s Australian Water Resources Assessment 2000 (AWRA 2000), the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry took responsibility for managing the water data theme, which commenced under the Audit. In 2003 the then sponsors of the water data theme established the Executive Steering Committee for Australian Water Resources Information (ESCAWRI) [PDF 103KB].
Membership of ESCAWRI currently includes the Australian Government Department of the Environment and Water Resources, a representative from each State and Territory government and a representative from the Bureau of Meteorology; the National Water Commission; the Bureau of Rural Sciences; the Australian Bureau of Statistics; the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission.
In 2007 sponsorship of the water data theme was transferred to the Department of the Environment and Water Resources then in July 2007, to the Bureau of Meteorology.
The ESCAWRI oversees the Australian Water Data Infrastructure Project.
What are the AWDIP Outputs?
Work being undertaken by the AWDIP includes:
- A comprehensive study to identify stakeholders, their roles, responsibilities, data requirements and information priorities;
- An analysis of the AWRA 2000 against stakeholder requirements and priorities to identify data gaps, consistency, appropriateness and spatial coverage of data;
- A collation of existing water data standards, protocols and infrastructures;
- Integration of hydrographic databases with relational database systems;
- Development of a basic web interface to demonstrate data queries and delivery for priority datasets from the nodes using a network of linked agency databases;
- Co-operatively developed and agreed data standards to enable access to data from different sources in a consistent format, using standardised request and response schemas;
- Development of the Web Feature Service (WFS) server requirements and implementation in jurisdictions; and
- Documentation on AWDIP including the framework, vocabularies and code lists, request and response schemas and reference implementation.
ESCAWRI has endorsed a workplan [PDF 178KB] for AWDIP in 2007-08.
Why build the Australian Water Data Infrastructure (AWDI)?
There are many collectors of water data across Australia. For example, a survey indicates that Australia spends about $140-$170 million each year across more than 1,000 water quality monitoring programs (Atech, 2002). There are also many users of water data spanning the community including resource managers, irrigators, mining companies, universities, Landcare groups and consultants. The AWDI aims to better coordinate the linkage between the suppliers and users of priority water datasets.
From a data user perspective the infrastructure aims to:
- Provide a single national access point, making it easier to find key water data;
- Increase productivity as users would not have to spend time and resources in accommodating different data formats from different suppliers;
- Reduce any confusion about what the data means, lessening the risk of misinterpretation that may seriously effect the outcomes of their work; and
- Provide better access to software tools developed around data standards and protocols.
From a data provider perspective the infrastructure aims to:
- Formalise their role as custodian of water data as part of nationally coordinated arrangements;
- Make the release of data more efficient and simple based on an agreed national standard;
- Lessen the risk that their data will be misinterpreted and misused;
- Provide a consistent and cost effective mode of access for public domain data;
- Provide standard protocols in how the quality of the water data is described;
- Facilitate sharing of costs associated with delivery of water data;
- Encourage the shared development of technology required for the storage, maintenance, transfer and presentation of water data;
- Provide greater access to data that has been collected within their jurisdiction by other agencies; and
- Provide opportunities for training and development of staff.
How is the AWDI governed?
The Technical Working Group of ESCAWRI has developed a governance model [PDF 372KB] (including Artefacts [PDF 279KB]) for AWDI. The AWDI framework contains a number of objects that require governance, including:
- Models (including data storage, data transfer, metadata, and querying);
- Schemas (for implementing models);
- Vocabularies (code lists);
- AWDI profiles (including compliance tests);
- Quality standards;
- Registry for publishing service descriptions;
- Issues register; and
- Output stylesheets.
What are the AWDIP features?
Responsibilities
The Australian Water Data Infrastructure (AWDI) provides a mechanism for data users to obtain information directly from the data managers, thus allowing for point of truth access. The AWDI has been designed with the basic principle of maintaining data custodian responsibilities. This allows data custodians to control both the data that they make publicly available through the infrastructure, and the data access requirements.
The information that is collected and stored in databases by State and Territory agencies will continue to be managed by them within their own data systems. This simplifies their custodial responsibility and alleviates double handling. The establishment of a modular system with multiple nodes (for database querying and data retrieval) allowing for the development of client-specific interfaces (not necessarily web) to present that data, provides a framework that is very flexible. Additional interfaces and nodes may be established at any stage, and the transfer of functions between organisations, if necessary, is relatively simple.
Access to data by the interfaces would need to be by agreement with the agency holding the data.
Collaboration
Input from the participating State and Territory agencies has allowed the Australian Water Data Infrastructure to be collaboratively designed, levering off the specific and varied expertise available from within the Technical Working Group.
The strong collaborative relationship developed between the agencies involved in this project has significantly reduced the time and cost of establishing the required tools and expertise, and improved the outcome.
The readiness to share the developments within the group has ensured consistency and interagency understanding of agency specific processes. Sharing at this level is likely to promote the implementation of best practice processes Australia wide.
Open Standards
The infrastructure is designed to be interoperable, that is with the capability of exchanging data via a common set of business procedures, using standard file formats and protocols. Implementation of the Australian Water Data Infrastructure does not require specific operating systems nor applications, instead relying on Open Standards developed by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C – Geographic Markup Language (GML)), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC – Observations and Measurements) and Web Feature Services (WFS)) and International Organisation for Standardization (ISO – Geographic Metadata (ISO19115)).
The use of these Open Standards permits well understood and unambiguous communication between the components of the infrastructure. In this way the different parts of the system communicate in a pre-defined way, enabling on-the-fly querying of the databases, and delivery of responses that are consistent and readily interpreted. The use of the standards also allows the AWDIP to take advantage of developments in similar implementations in other disciplines.
How does the AWDIP relate to other national water data initiatives?
The ESCAWRI, through its Technical Working Group, has developed a paper [PDF 305KB] on the relationship of AWDIP to the Water Resources Observation Network (WRON) and the Australian Water Resources Information System (AWRIS).
Contact
If you have questions about this project, please contact:
Karina Budd – ESCAWRI Secretariat
Integrated Water Sciences Program
Bureau of Rural Sciences
Ph: 02 6272 5795
