The long tail of hydroinformatics: Implementing biological and oceanographic information in hydrologic information systems

dc.creatorHersh, Eric S.
dc.date.accessioned2013-03-15T20:50:04Z
dc.date.accessioned2013-11-12T23:35:36Z
dc.date.available2013-03-15T20:50:04Z
dc.date.available2013-11-12T23:35:36Z
dc.date.created2012-12
dc.date.issued2013-03-15
dc.description.abstractHydrologic Information Systems (HIS) have emerged as a means to organize, share, and synthesize water data. This work extends current HIS capabilities by providing additional capacity and flexibility for marine physical and chemical observations data and for freshwater and marine biological observations data. These goals are accomplished in two broad and disparate case studies–an HIS implementation for the oceanographic domain as applied to the offshore environment of the Chukchi Sea, a region of the Alaskan Arctic, and a separate HIS implementation for the aquatic biology and environmental flows domains as applied to Texas rivers. These case studies led to the development of a new four-dimensional data cube to accommodate biological observations data with axes of space, time, species, and trait, a new data model for biological observations, an expanded ontology and data dictionary for biological taxa and traits, and an expanded chain-of-custody approach for improved data source tracking. A large number of small studies across a wide range of disciplines comprise the “Long Tail” of science. This work builds upon the successes of the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) by applying HIS technologies to two new Long Tail disciplines: aquatic biology and oceanography. In this regard this research improves our understanding of how to deal with collections of biological data stored alongside sensor-based physical data. Based on the results of these case studies, a common framework for water information management for terrestrial and marine systems has emerged which consists of Hydrologic Information Systems for observations data, Geographic Information Systems for geographic data, and Digital Libraries for documents and other digital assets. It is envisioned that the next generation of HIS will be comprised of these three components and will thus actually be a Water Information System of Systems.en_US
dc.description.departmentResearch in Water Resources, Center foren_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2152/19753
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisherCenter for Research in Water Resources, University of Texas at Austinen_US
dc.relation.ispartofseriesCRWR online report;2012-05
dc.subjecthydrologyen_US
dc.subjecthydrologic information systemen_US
dc.subjectHISen_US
dc.subjectaquatic biologyen_US
dc.subjectoceanographyen_US
dc.subjectChukchi Seaen_US
dc.subjectTexas riversen_US
dc.subjectlong tailen_US
dc.subjectwater information managementen_US
dc.subjectGISen_US
dc.subjectdigital librariesen_US
dc.titleThe long tail of hydroinformatics: Implementing biological and oceanographic information in hydrologic information systemsen_US
dc.typeTechnical Reporten_US

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