20 September 2012 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has adopted the OGC WaterML 2.0 Part 1: Time Series Encoding Standard as an official OGC standard.

OGC WaterML 2.0 is an important new XML-based international standard for encoding and exchanging data describing the state and location of water resources, both above and below the ground surface. WaterML 2.0 Time Series supports encoding of hydrological and hydrogeological observation data in exchange scenarios such as:

-- Exchange of data for operational monitoring and forecasting programs

-- Supporting infrastructure operation (e.g. dams, supply systems)

-- Exchange of observational and forecast data for surface water and groundwater

-- Release of data for public dissemination

-- Enhancing disaster management through data exchange

-- Exchange in support of national reporting

The WaterML 2.0 Time Series work was supported through a water information research and development alliance between the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Water for a Healthy Country Flagship program and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The work was also supported by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Hydrologic Information System (CUAHSI) and many other organizations around the world. The following organizations submitted the candidate standard to the OGC membership for adoption:

-- Australian Bureau of Meteorology

-- CSIRO (Australia)

-- Deltares (Netherlands)

-- disy Informationssysteme GmbH (Germany)

-- Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute (Germany)

-- Geological Survey of Canada, Natural Resources Canada

-- German Federal Institute of Hydrology

-- International Office For Water – Sandre (France)

-- KISTERS AG (Germany)

-- San Diego Supercomputer Center (US)

-- US Geological Survey

-- US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

Dr David Maidment of the Center for Research in Water Resources, University of Texas at Austin, and leader of CUAHSI, which developed WaterML 1.0, said, “This is the first public, open source, global standard for the exchange of water information through the Internet. It is critical for linking local, regional, national and global water information sources into connected water information networks throughout the earth.”

Australian Bureau of Meteorology Deputy Director ­ Climate and Water, Dr. Dasarath Jayasuriya, welcomed the announcement of WaterML 2.0. "This is a great outcome for the Water Information community. In Australia, WaterML 2.0 will be used to guide development of the second version of the Water Data Transfer Format, which is designed to help the Australian water industry share data to the Bureau. This will enable the Bureau to efficiently ingest and process water data and provide it to the community in a timely manner. Using these standards will significantly improve the quality and comparability of the water data the Bureau publishes," Dr Jayasuriya said.

The WaterML 2.0 Time Series Encoding standard is implemented as an application schema of the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard version 3.2.1 and encodes hydrologic semantics onto the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) model and encoding standards. It is thus compatible with a wide variety of geospatial and sensor web systems. It is the first exchange standard of a suite of information standards being developed by OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group to communicate and standardize services for exchanging hydrologic information.

The OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group is a Joint Working Group of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the OGC, involving hydrological and government agencies, software providers, universities and research organizations from Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA and other countries.

The OGC WaterML 2.0 Part 1: Time Series Encoding Standard document is free and can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/waterml.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.