Open Data Formats

There has been an explosion of free open data services on various aspects of water, most of them based on earth observation and global models and providing synoptic global coverage.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) supports ways to create free, public, open geospatial standards to promote interoperability. OGC standards are developed to make location information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. They are used by software developers to build open interfaces and encodings into their products and services. The following are some of the standards:

• The OpenGIS® Web Map Service (WMS) Interface Standard provides a simple HTTP interface for requesting geo-registered map images from one or more distributed geospatial databases. A WMS request defines the geographic layer(s) and area of interest to be processed. The response to the request is one or more geo-registered map images (returned as JPEG, PNG, etc.) that can be displayed in a browser application ( Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards ).
• The Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) Implementation Standard provides a standard based solution to serve digital maps using predefined image tiles. The service advertises the tiles it has available through a standardized declaration in the ServiceMetadata document common to all OGC web services ( Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards ).
• The Web Feature Service (WFS) represents a change in the way geographic information is created, modified and exchanged on the Internet. Rather than sharing geographic information at the file level using File Transfer Protocol (FTP), for example, the WFS offers direct fine-grained access to geographic information at the feature and feature property level.
• WaterML is a standard information model for the representation of water observations data, with the intent of allowing the exchange of such data sets across information systems. There is also a GroundwaterML standard that is being explore for groundwater as part of this work.

Open APIs

Open APIs are publicly available application programming interfaces which provide developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service. They allow developers, to access backend data that can then be used to enhance their own applications. APIs such as the Floodizer flood detection API , a cross browsers REST API which get a JSON input with a still photo (as base64 encoded string), containing flooded areas and returns a JSON string which contains predictions of the input photo regarding the probability of a flood. The Rainviewer API : provides access to mapping data of rainfall based on information from weather radars globally.

Creating Online Services

Below are some examples of available online services.

Spatial Agent Data Primer:

The Malawi Spatial Data Platform: is a public geospatial platform providing maps, datasets on developmental sectors in Malawi. For water, the platform has datasets on rivers, lakes, water quality, water utilization plans, including the risks and hazards of flooding and droughts.

Transboundary Waters Assessment Programme

The groundwater component of the Transboundary Waters Assessment Programme (TWAP) provides aggregated information for the main transboundary aquifers and Small Island Developing States (SIDS). The data that has been made available in the TWAP Groundwater Information System(link is external) includes core indicators, encompassing the hydrogeological, environmental, socio-economic and governance dimensions of the systems.

World Bank Water Data

World Bank Water Data is an online source for all water-related open data at the World Bank, where there are datasets and applications generated or compiled by the Water Global Practice with the support of the Global Water Security & Sanitation Partnership (GWSP). The datasets curated from world bank open data catalog, initiatives such as SIASAR and IBNET, in addition to external data sources.

Metadata Examples (Themes: Climate, Hydrology, Environment, Social, Economic, Other)