Expanding Public and Private Sector Access to Reclamation's Water and
Water-related Data
Abstract
The Bureau of Reclamation serves water to 31 million people and 20
percent of irrigators in the western United States. Reclamation
generates large amounts of data and information describing reservoir
operations, hydropower generation, environmental compliance, invasive
mussels, infrastructure, and other aspects of Reclamation’s mission
activities. Much of these data are currently accessed on a
program-specific basis via legacy information management & technology
(IMT) systems, often without modern features such as machine-readable
data formats and web-services. The Department of the Interior’s Open
Water Data Initiative addresses these issues, and Reclamation is
striving to improve its data-publishing efforts, making its data more
easily found, accessed, and applied to support public and private sector
activities. This presentation provides an overview of two IMT systems
that Reclamation has developed under OWDI: the Reclamation Water
Information System (RWIS, water.usbr.gov) and the Reclamation
Information Sharing Environment (RISE). RWIS was developed first as a
pilot, demonstrating how multiple programs’ water data could be combined
into a modernized data-publishing system. It provides free access to
reservoir and water time series data from Reclamation’s five regions,
includes map and query interfaces for data discovery and access, and
web-services for automated retrieval. Based on the success of the RWIS
pilot, Reclamation has more recently focused on developing RISE, which
will envelop RWIS and feature a much larger collection of Reclamation
data, including water quality as it pertains to Reclamation water
management activities, invasive mussels, hydropower, and infrastructure,
and more. RISE will also serve a mix of data types, going beyond RWIS’
scope of time series data to also include geospatial and documents data.
This presentation summarizes RISE development approach, architecture and
previews the upcoming release in Winter 2019.