OGC Seeks Public Comment on GroundwaterML v2.3 Candidate Standard

14 January 2019: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on an updated version of the ‘OGC WaterML 2: Part 4 – GroundWaterML 2 (GWML2)’ candidate standard.

The GroundWaterML2 standard (GWML2) describes a conceptual and logical schema for the exchange of groundwater data, as well as a GML/XML encoding. Changes in GWML2 version 2.3 include:

1. The addition of a compact encoding using the OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards for information recorded along the length of a water well;
2. An encoding strategy to connect a water well with this information using the OGC Observations and Measurements standard, and;
3. A logical schema change that increases the maximum number of entries from one to many for two well construction properties.

All changes are backward compatible with the previous GWML2 schemas.

A significant portion of the global water supply can be attributed to groundwater resources. Effective management of such resources requires the collection, management and delivery of related data, but these are impeded by issues related to data availability, distribution, fragmentation, and heterogeneity: collected data is not all readily available and accessible, available data is distributed across many agencies in different sectors and often thematically fragmented, and similar types of data are diversely structured by the various data providers. This situation holds both within and between political entities, such as countries or states, impairing groundwater management across all jurisdictions.

Groundwater data networks are an emerging solution to this problem as they couple data providers through a unified data delivery vehicle based on open standards for data access and data content. The relative maturity of OGC data access standards, such as the Web Feature Service (WFS) and Sensor Observation Service (SOS), combined with the rise of water data networks, have created a need for a common groundwater data standard: GroundWaterML2.

The primary goal of this standard is to capture the semantics, schema, and encoding syntax of key groundwater data, in order to enable information systems to interoperate with such data. The GroundwaterML2 standard (GWML2) forms Part 4 of the WaterML 2 suite of standards.

The candidate ‘WaterML 2: Part 4 – GroundWaterML 2 (GWML2)’ standard is available for review and comment on the OGC Portal. Comments are due by 13th February 2019 and should be submitted via the method outlined on the ‘WaterML 2: Part 4 – GroundWaterML 2 (GWML2)’ Standard’s request page.