Overview

The Health-e-Waterways project is a collaboration between the UQ eResearch group, the South East Queensland Healthy Waterways Partnership and Microsoft Research.

The project aims to develop cyber-infrastructure to address new management and decision-making challenges concerning Queensland's water supply. In particular, it aims to enable and promote the sharing and collaborative integration and analysis of high quality information concerning water. Due to climate change, urban development and population growth, recent years have seen large investments in Queensland's water supply infrastructure. This has created a need for sophisticated technological solutions to allow scientists, urban planners and policy makers to track water movement, consumption and quality through the entire supply process.

The Health-e-Waterways project is funded by Microsoft Research and an ARC Linkage grant.

Goals

The Health-e-Waterways project goals are to:

• Assist decision-making by providing scientists, urban planners and policy-makers with fast, web-based access to data and models describing all water-supply related data,
• Develop frameworks and services that provide streamlined access to real-time, near-real-time and static datasets with collaborative tools that will establish an online "community of practice", and
• Unite Queensland's water information, making it universally accessible and useful; this will result in a geographically distributed network of hydrologic data sources and functions, integrated using web services, functioning as a seamless, integrated whole.

An architecture diagram for the proposed system

Project Timeline

The Health-e-Waterways project will be developed in six phases:

1. Identification and prioritisation of the key stakeholder user requirements, queries and datasets.
2. Development of the common data models and ontologies to integrate both static and real-time data streams; visual, spatial and temporal data; legacy databases; and newly generated datasets.
3. Design and implementation of the semantic interoperability layer on the scientific data server.
4. Develop a Web-based querying, visualisation and presentation interface - that integrates GIS technologies (e.g., ARC Hydro) with VirtualEarth-type interfaces, ontology-based querys and SensorMaps - to display the latest integrated data sets through a mapping interface.
5. Development of a secure Web Portal and WaterWiki that provides different levels of collaborative access to data, models, services, storage and compute power. Standardised authentication and access protocols will enforce controlled access to resources and software.
6. Creation of a model registry and scientific workflow tools. This component will enable users to upload and share models as web services through a common model registry, link them using scientific workflows and execute them over grid computing infrastructure.

Further Information

To contact individuals involved in the project, use the contact details listed on the people page. If you are a stakeholder, and you wish to download project documentation, go to the reports page.