The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced that it will demonstrate the results of the OGC Climate-Hydrologic Information Sharing Pilot, Phase 1 (CHISP-1) at a webinar to be held from 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, April 16, 2013. The public is invited to register for the webinar. After the webinar, detailed CHISP-1 Engineering Reports will be made available to the public on the OGC Public Engineering Report website.
CHISP-1 is prototyping an innovative inter-disciplinary, inter-agency and international virtual observatory system for publishing water resources information collected from observations and forecasts in the U.S. and Canada, building on current networks and capabilities. CHISP-1 is designed to support:
— Hydrologic modeling for historical and current stream flow and groundwater conditions. This requires the integration of trans-boundary stream flow and groundwater well data from the Canadian Groundwater Information Network and the US National Groundwater Monitoring Network, as well as national river network data from multiple agencies, including the US National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) and the Canadian National Hydrology Network (NHN). The demo focuses on cross-border communication about Souris River and Milk River water levels. The emphasis is on time series data and real-time flood monitoring.
— Modeling and assessment of nutrient load into the Great Lakes. This requires accessing water-quality data from multiple agencies and integrating the data with stream flow information for calculating loads. The emphasis is on discrete sampled water quality observations, linking those to specific NHD stream reaches and catchments, and additional metadata for sampled data.
CHISP-1 demonstrates how adherence to open service interface and encoding standards from the OGC in proprietary and open source software makes it possible to link hydrologic observations data to the stream network, enabling queries of conditions upstream from a given location to return data from all relevant gages and well locations. This has previously not been practical with the diverse data sources available.
CHISP-1 also provides a model approach for bridging differences in semantics across information models and processes used by various data producers, to improve hydrologic and water quality modeling capabilities.
The following organizations sponsored CHISP-1:
GeoConnections (Natural Resources Canada)
US Geological Survey (USGS)
US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
The following participants provided standards-based technology solutions:
Explorus Data Solutions Inc., Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Geographic Information System Research Center, Feng Chia University (GIS.FCU), Taichung, Chinese Taipei
Natural Resources Canada
RPS-ASA, South Kingstown, Rhode Island USA
Data and web services were provided by the American Geosciences Institute, Environment Canada, the EPA, Natural Resources Canada and USGS.
OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments are part of the OGC Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on collaborative prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliver proven candidate spatial encoding and interface standards into the OGC Standards Program, where they are formalized for release as adopted OGC Standards.
