The Open Geospatial Consortium will launch a Hydrology Surface Water Interoperability Experiment (IE) on 15 June, 2010. The OGC is requesting participation by organizations that are interested in sharing surface water data.

The Surface Water IE will advance the development of WaterML 2.0 and test its use with various OGC service standards. The IE will also contribute to the development of a hydrology domain feature model and vocabularies, which are essential for interoperability within the hydrology domain.

The experiment will develop and test WaterML 2.0 to insure that three typical hydrological use case scenarios are supported:
— Surface water data exchange across national and organizational jurisdictions
— Surface water flow data discovery for forecast modeling
— Quantifying the flow of surface water to coastal systems

The IE will also test implementations of OGC services and clients that are required to support these objectives. The results of the IE will be documented in OGC engineering reports and change requests to existing OGC standards.

The Interoperability Experiment initiators include these OGC Members: the International Office for Water – Service ‘Administration National des Données et Référentiels sur l’Eau (Sandre); Service Centre Information Technology of the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development (DLZ-IT BMVBS); US Geological Survey; Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation; KISTERS Environmental and Resource Management Software Solutions; and disy Informationssysteme GmbH. This IE is also supported by the World Meteorological Organisation.

A summary of the activity plan, requirements for participation, schedule, and kick-off meeting details are available here. Expressions of interest in participating are due by 12 June, 2010. Contact David Arctur (darctur@opengeospatial.org) for further details  or to register as a participant.

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