Integrated groundwater data management

Abstract

The goal of a data manager is to ensure that data is safely stored, adequately described, discoverable and easily accessible. However, to keep pace with the evolution of groundwater studies in the last decade, the associated data and data management requirements have changed significantly. In particular, there is a growing recognition that management questions cannot be adequately answered by single discipline studies. This has led a push towards the paradigm of integrated modeling, where diverse parts of the hydrological cycle and its human connections are included. This chapter describes groundwater data management practices, and reviews the current state of the art with enterprise groundwater database management systems. It also includes discussion on commonly used data management models, detailing typical data management lifecycles. We discuss the growing use of web services and open standards such as GWML and WaterML2.0 to exchange groundwater information and knowledge, and the need for national data networks. We also discuss cross-jurisdictional interoperability issues, based on our experience sharing groundwater data across the US/Canadian border. Lastly, we present some future trends relating to groundwater data management.