Water and open data, access to national and international data

Water is, without a doubt, one of the essential natural resources for humanity and life on the planet. Publication of data on water management, from both the social and the environmental point of view, is fundamental for society as a whole. As far as the administration and competencies are concerned, agriculture and environment agencies are often responsible for water management data and, therefore, are responsible for policies regarding transparency and publication of information.

In Spain, for example, the Directorate General for Water of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and the Environment (MAPAMA) is responsible for preparing and publishing reports based on the assessment of hydrological plans, scarcity risks, water quality, etc.. However, the data is not currently available in transparent formats for reuse.

At European level, it is WISE (Water Information System for Europe, a partnership between the EEA - European Environment Agency - and the Commission), which coordinates the different agencies in relation to water policies. From the point of view of publication, the following can be highlighted:

• Thematic repository of the EEA, which includes space resources and the water quality database

• Water-related statistics, managed by Eurostat

At the international level (including the USA government agency, the UK, UN or Open Water Foundation) and from the technical point of view regarding the publication of water data, two approaches can be noted according to the nature of the data:

• In the case of numerical information, tabular plain text files are usually used for data representation. In general, the CSV (Comma Separated Values) format is used, although there are also cases, such as Eurostat, where the TSV (Tab Separated Values) format is used to represent the series.

• Since water has a strong spatial component, interpretable through maps, much information related to water is published using spatial and geographical representation formats such as GeoJSON or shapefiles.

• Also to be noted is the most highly developed standard for representation of observations on water, designed for the publication and exchange of information between systems: WaterML, an open standard of the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium, used by some countries and organizations, although not adopted globally.

From the point of view of open data, it is surprising that there are few public catalogues related to water information at the national level, especially considering the sensitive nature and social interest pertaining to its management, and the relevance it has from the economic point of view (e.g. in the field of agro-industry and food). It is also important to highlight the lack of specific standards and formats for representation, which confirms that water has not been a central part of governmental data publication strategies.

However, pressure from cooperation support organizations, sectoral associations, the general public and the emergence of a new ecosystem of business initiatives fuel the hope that there will be a paradigm shift in publishing and accessing data from an industry, concerned with the management and exploitation of water, which annually moves more than 500,000 million euros worldwide.