Recent advances in the design and implementation of community-focused continental-scale digital hydrologic data infrastructure in service of integrated water modeling.

Many models of hydrologic phenomena are data hungry. Parameter estimates for model formulations used to represent catchments, waterbodies, and hydrogeologic units require accurate data. Additional data are required to force, validate, and calibrate models. These data needs combined with the massive scale of continental domain integrated water models demands unique architecture and engineering for systems that assemble and store required data and underpin modeling frameworks. The challenge is all the more complex if we recognize that delivering model predictions to an integrated and modern Web-available data system is key to these model's utility. Recent advances from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in Web infrastructure and data architecture could support this new generation of models.

Assembly and later deployment of accessible and interoperable water models requires persistent and shared identification of spatial features and linked information. A key example of this is "community reference features" and linked observational data which are commonly used across multiple hydrologic models. For example, a river, a monitoring location, and the spatial feature representing the river. A new persistent Web identifier registry, geoconnex.us, is being implemented by the Internet of Water Coalition. The identifier registry is the core component of the broader geoconnex infrastructure. Architecture and engineering of the geoconnex spatial linked data infrastructure presents numerous conceptual and technical challenges. Many have been addressed by the W3C Spatial Data on the Web Working Group and the OGC Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiments, but many questions remain open. The intended use of community reference features has been used as a driver for their design such that they are useful to a critical mass of applications. The utility-driven approach has been important in guiding how much architectural complexity to take on as well as what technical solutions to choose for reference feature representation and integration. This presentation will provide background and describe progress on both conceptual and technical issues related to networked community reference features and their linking to Web-available water data.