The long tail of hydroinformatics: Implementing biological and oceanographic information in hydrologic information systems
Abstract
Hydrologic Information Systems (HIS) have emerged
as a means to organize, share, and
synthesize water data.
This work extends current HIS capabilities
by
providing
additional capacity and flexibility
for
marine
physical and chemical
observations data and
for
freshwater
and
marine biological
observations
data.
These goals are accomplished
in
two
broad and disparate
case studies–an
HIS implementation for the oceanographic
domain as applied to the offshore environment of the Chukchi Sea, a region of the
Alaskan
Arctic, and a separate
HIS implementation for the aquatic biology and
environmental flows domains
as applied to Texas rivers.
These case studies led to the
development of a new four-dimensional data cube to accommodate biological
observations data with axes of space, time, species, and trait, a new data model for
biological observations, an expanded
ontology and data dictionary for biological taxa and
traits, and an expanded chain-of-custody approach for improved data source tracking.
A
large number of small studies across a wide range of disciplines comprise the “Long Tail” of science. This work builds upon the successes of the Consortium of Universities
for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) by applying HIS
technologies to two new Long Tail disciplines: aquatic biology and oceanography. In
this regard
this research improves our
understanding of how to deal with collections of
biological data stored alongside sensor-based physical data.
Based on the results of these
case studies, a
common
framework for water information management for terrestrial and
marine systems
has emerged which consists of Hydrologic Information Systems
for
observations data,
Geographic Information Systems for geographic data,
and
Digital
Libraries for
documents and other
digital assets.
It is envisioned that the next generation
of
HIS
will be comprised of these three components and will thus actually be a Water
Information System of Systems.