WEHUB nominated as water champion

trevor.kenney — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:14:30 +0000

The Water and Environmental Hub (WEHUB) has been nominated as a featured "water champion" project by Water's Next, an annual publication of Water Canada magazine. This issue highlights "significant contributions to Canada's Waterscape," with the WEHUB being designated by a committee of water experts as a Canadian project worth spotlighting.

The WEHUB is a cloud-based open web platform that collects and shares water and environmental data from across geographical and watershed boundaries. The goal of the project, which began in 2010, is to make all such data open and easily accessible via the web, freeing up valuable search time for researchers and those interested in water-based information, such as river flows, lake turbidity, or bird migration routes. The platform also features an application programming interface (API), which enables the development of water-based, customized applications for tablet computers or smartphones.

The beta web version of the WEHUB was launched in December 2011, and information from 1,738 observation datasets is now available online. The project is led by the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, with financial and technical support from Cybera, Tesera Systems, and the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Calgary Biogeoscience Institute.

When then-Minister of Environment Jim Prentice announced the federal government's desire to keep more accurate and up-to-date information around water and water data in 2010, the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge jumped at the opportunity to get involved. The result is an open-source web platform called the Water and Environmental Hub, or WEHUB for short.

The WEHUB website will offer searchable, customizable data interpretation through its application programming interface (API), which will allow users and organizations to build applications for managing the data to suit their needs, with the potential to share those applications and findings with other users.

"We reached out to our good friend and partner (WEHUB's executive director, Alex Joseph) at Cybera to serve as primary contact in WEHUB's creation," says Daniel Weeks, VP of research at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge. "Alex is the key player in this process."

Cybera is a not-for-profit organization that works to facilitate technological innovation in the province of Alberta through the use of cyber infrastructure. At the end of March 2012, WEHUB itself will officially become a not-for-profit.

"A lot of organizations have already been aggregating valuable data, but they don't have the ability to manage or publish it," Joseph says. "We want to plug directly into organizations' data banks so that users can aggregate and interpret data on demand from the organization via WEHUB."

This goal of total collaboration is a couple of years away as software must be upgraded across various organizations and as phase one of WEHUB's development is completed in 2012.

"Phase one included development of the platform, adding data and facilitating the development of applications," Joseph says. "Phase two will be to connect with more provinces and engage more organizations to include their data and build applications."

Joseph estimates that there are thousands of custom applications possible.

"We're making the data available through API, making it easy for smartphone and web developers to build these apps and even embed the data in their sites," he says. " This project will go a long way to providing a clearer line of sight to water quality, to the need for more rigorous testing, and to the need for more robust policy."

For example, a watershed organization might produce a yearly report, collecting data from various sources throughout the year. By the time that report is released, most of the data will already be outdated. A custom application would allow the organization to connect and interact with other groups, live data sources, policy makers and community members in real time, spending less time and energy on research while providing current, relevant information in its reports.

"There have already been projects identified to enable better water management and watershed planning," says Joseph. "The missing piece has been that data infrastructure to bring different organizations and community groups together."

Water Hub launches website, video

trevor.kenney — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:14:42 +0000

To coincide with tomorrow's International Open Data Day, a cloud-based, open web platform that collects and shares water and environmental data, from across geographical and watershed boundaries, has launched its beta web version and project profile video.

The Water and Environmental Hub (WEHUB) features a water data catalogue and an application programming interface (API), which enables water-based, customized applications for computer tablets or smartphones to be easily developed.

The project is led by the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge, with financial and technical support from Cybera, Tesera Systems, the Alberta WaterPortal, and the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Calgary Biogeoscience Institute.

Robin Winsor, President and CEO of Cybera, sees the WEHUB project as an example of the benefits that open source projects can provide to communities. "It also demonstrates the ground-breaking cyberinfrastructure technologies developed in Alberta by companies such as Cybera, which can aid large-scale cloud projects to share a vast amount of data with researchers and society at large," says Winsor.

The open web platform was developed to be an online source of data, and will help academia, government, industry, non-governmental organizations, and the general public, to find, use, share and enhance water and environmental data. In addition to providing information uploaded by organizations and individual users, the WEHUB actively seeks out and aggregates open data from across the Web. Water and environmental data that previously would have required extensive searching across many different websites can now be found in one place, saving users significant time and resources.

"The WEHUB is one of the largest sources on the web for North American water and environmental data, and this video and beta version of the web portal will help users understand how extensive and accessible it is," says Alex Joseph, Executive Director of the WEHUB project. "We expect the WEHUB to become the go-to site for anyone searching for geospatial data related to water or the environment."

The WEHUB also offers a real-time data collection service and output tool (API) that allows companies, software developers, and other users to develop customized water applications for computer tablets or smartphones. Users can also embed water and environmental data into their organizational processes using the WEHUB web platform.

"We want businesses to become aware of the potential for WEHUB to provide commercial opportunities in analyzing and manipulating this data," says Dr. Dan Weeks, Vice-President, Research at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge. "Applications, such as home water-saving tools, or systems that display river or lake water levels and temperatures, can be built on the data that this web platform provides."

View the WEHUB beta website : http://waterenvironmentalhub.ca/

UNews - Tesera Systems

WEHUB nominated as water champion

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