Research

Hydrologic information science involves the description of hydrologic environments in a consistent way, using data models for information integration.

Hydrologic Informatics

This research will look for more efficient methods and models for discovering, locating and working with hydrologic information in pursuing and transforming research in hydrologic science. This research will be informed and prioritized based on interactions with the proto-observatories to identify informatics problems that need to be resolved to support observatory development. Some specific topics, with the assigned group within the CUAHSI-HIS team are indicated in parentheses, are:

• Data models for time-space data fusion in digital watersheds. (All)
• Representation of continental scale water processes and the data support required for implementation of hydrologic models of flow in streams for the entire continent. (UT)
• Cyberinfrastructure involved with linking environmental sensors to observations data models and creation of bi-directional feedback between sensors and HIS. (USU)
• Semantic Mediation and Global Data Search and Discovery. (Drexel)
• Controlled vocabularies and metadata for semantic annotation of hydrologic information. (Drexel)
• Data models for representing added hydrologic features in environmental observatories; comprehensive integration between hydrologic observations and geographic representations at the landscape scale, including context-based addressing to locate observations relative to their surroundings such as meters downstream from the junction of streams A and B, rather than just an x,y point in geographic space. (USU)
• Hydrologic modeling in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).  This research will result in web service signatures that can be used to expose hydrologic models as web services consumable by workflow and component-based modeling clients such as Kepler, OpenMI, CyberIntegrater, ModelBuilder, and the Common Component Architecture (CCA). (USC)
• Integration with web services and portals maintained by related earth sciences projects, and design of service oriented architecture and computational framework supporting comprehensive hydrologic modeling within digital watersheds. (SDSC)
• Construction and maintenance of observations data catalogs across multiple agency and academic data sources (SDSC)
• OLAP technology for rapid generation of data summaries from catalogs and datasets, and integration of spatial predicates into OLAP queries (SDSC)
• Integration of CUAHSI HIS infrastructure with streaming data middleware (SDSC)

Current Project Info

These are the projects currently being investigated by the CUAHSI-HIS team:

• WaterOneFlow interface for OpenMI (University of South Carolina), http://code.google.com/p/openmimodels/