Developed by | Open Geospatial Consortium |
---|---|
Latest release | 2.0.1 (2014-02-24) |
Type of format | Time series |
Extended from | XML |
Open format? | Yes, with Copyright [1] |
WaterML is a technical standard and information model used to represent hydrological time series structures. The current version is WaterML 2.0, released an open standard [2] of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
Version 1.0 of WaterML was published in 2009 by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science. [3] WaterML 1.0 (and 1.1) is an XML exchange format developed for use specifically in the United States.
WaterML 2.0 is an open standard [2] of the OGC. Version 2.0 marks a harmonisation with different formats from various organisations and countries, including the Australian Water Data Transfer Format, WaterML 1.0 from the United States, [3] XHydro from Germany, and with existing OGC formats. WaterML 2.0 was adopted as an official standard by the OGC in September 2012, [4] [5] endorsed by the US Federal Geographic Data Committee, [6] and has been proposed for adoption by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). [7]
Example uses include: exchange of data for operational hydrological monitoring programs; supporting operation of infrastructure (e.g. dams, supply systems); cross-border exchange of observational data; release of data for public dissemination; enhancing disaster management through data exchange; and exchange in support of national reporting. The standard was developed through a harmonisation process [8] by members of the joint OGC-WMO Hydrology Domain Working Group. [9]
WaterML 2.0 makes use of existing OGC standards, primarily Observations and Measurements (O&M) and the Geography Markup Language (GML). This enhances consistency and interoperability with other standards and web services. Through use of the O&M standard, WaterML 2.0 defines types allowing for standard definition of the core properties relating to hydrological time series, including:
The core information model is defined using the Unified Modelling Language, allowing for flexibility in creating implementation-specific encodings. The standard defines a GML-conformant XML encoding allowing for use with OGC Web Services.
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards for cybersecurity, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), emergency management, cloud computing, legal data exchange, energy, content technologies, and other areas.
The Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographical features. GML serves as a modeling language for geographic systems as well as an open interchange format for geographic transactions on the Internet. Key to GML's utility is its ability to integrate all forms of geographic information, including not only conventional "vector" or discrete objects, but coverages and sensor data.
A coverage is the digital representation of some spatio-temporal phenomenon. ISO 19123 provides the definition:
In computing, the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as the "source code" behind a map, whereas the WMS interface or online tiled mapping portals like Google Maps return only an image, which end-users cannot edit or spatially analyze. The XML-based GML furnishes the default payload-encoding for transporting geographic features, but other formats like shapefiles can also serve for transport. In early 2006 the OGC members approved the OpenGIS GML Simple Features Profile. This profile is designed both to increase interoperability between WFS servers and to improve the ease of implementation of the WFS standard.
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole, Inc, which was acquired by Google in 2004. KML became an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008. Google Earth was the first program able to view and graphically edit KML files, but other projects such as Marble have added KML support.
SensorML is an approved Open Geospatial Consortium standard. SensorML provides standard models and an XML encoding for describing sensors and measurement processes. SensorML can be used to describe a wide range of sensors, including both dynamic and stationary platforms and both in-situ and remote sensors.
CityGML is an open standardised data model and exchange format to store digital 3D models of cities and landscapes. It defines ways to describe most of the common 3D features and objects found in cities and the relationships between them. It also defines different standard levels of detail (LoDs) for the 3D objects, which allows the representation of objects for different applications and purposes, such as simulations, urban data mining, facility management, and thematic inquiries.
GeoRSS is a specification for encoding location as part of a Web feed. (Web feeds are used to describe feeds of content, such as news articles, Audio blogs, video blogs and text blog entries. These web feeds are rendered by programs such as aggregators and web browsers.) The name "GeoRSS" is derived from RSS, the most known Web feed and syndication format.
Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.
GeoSciML or Geoscience Markup Language is a GML Application Schema that can be used to transfer information about geology, with an emphasis on the "interpreted geology" that is conventionally portrayed on geologic maps. Its feature-type catalogue includes Geologic Unit, Mapped Feature, Earth Material, Geologic Structure, and specializations of these, as well as Borehole and other observational artefacts. It was created by, and is governed by, the Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI) to support interoperability of information served from Geologic Surveys and other data custodians. It will be used in the OneGeology project, an effort to create a geological map of the entire Earth, served live by merging data from many national geological surveys.
The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Coverage Service Interface Standard (WCS) defines Web-based retrieval of coverages – that is, digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena.
Observations and Measurements (O&M) is an international standard which defines a conceptual schema encoding for observations, and for features involved in sampling when making observations. While the O&M standard was developed in the context of geographic information systems, the model is derived from generic patterns proposed by Fowler and Odell, and is not limited to spatial information. O&M is one of the core standards in the OGC Sensor Web Enablement suite, providing the response model for Sensor Observation Service (SOS).
The OpenMI Standard defines an interface that allows models to exchange data in memory at run-time. When the standard is implemented, existing models can be run simultaneously and share information, for instance at each time step, making model integration feasible at the operational level. The OpenMI standard was created with the intent to facilitate model integration, which is helpful in understanding and predicting process interactions and achieving an integrated approach to environmental management.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization, originated in 1994. In the OGC, more than 500 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations collaborate in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards for geospatial content and services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing.
The Sensor Observation Service (SOS) is a web service to query real-time sensor data and sensor data time series and is part of the Sensor Web. The offered sensor data consists of data directly from the sensors, which are encoded in the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), and the measured values in the Observations and Measurements encoding format. The web service as well as both file formats are open standards and specifications of the same name defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
The Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) defines a language for filtering and processing of multi-dimensional raster coverages, such as sensor, simulation, image, and statistics data. The Web Coverage Processing Service is maintained by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). This raster query language allows clients to obtain original coverage data, or derived information, in a platform-neutral manner over the Web.
GeoSPARQL is a standard for representation and querying of geospatial linked data for the Semantic Web from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The definition of a small ontology based on well-understood OGC standards is intended to provide a standardized exchange basis for geospatial RDF data which can support both qualitative and quantitative spatial reasoning and querying with the SPARQL database query language.
The Augmented Reality Markup Language (ARML) is a data standard to describe and interact with augmented reality (AR) scenes. It has been developed within the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) by a dedicated ARML 2.0 Standards Working Group. ARML consists of both an XML grammar to describe the location and appearance of virtual objects in the scene, as well as ECMAScript bindings to allow dynamic access to the properties of the virtual objects, as well as event handling, and is currently published in version 2.0. ARML focuses on visual augmented reality.