Water data for water science and management: Advancing an Internet of Water (IoW)

n the face of climate change, natural resource and environmental quality managers around the world face increasing pressure to manage water carefully and ensure its quality for sustainable water supplies, sanitation, and public health. These managers require information derived from water data—including administrative records, as well as results from environmental measurement, monitoring, modeling, analysis, and assessment. However, data production is distributed across a fragmented system of natural resource and environmental governance across sectors and jurisdictions within and between countries. This fragmentation means that data are collected for different purposes across different scales, and stored and published in innumerable formats and platforms. While these data are often made public, their staggering heterogeneity makes them difficult to find and use beyond the primary purpose for which they were collected [1]. Thus, analysts spend more time finding, cleaning, and formatting data than on analysis. In addition to these technical issues, the cultures of agencies that manage public water are generally wary of opening, sharing, and reusing water data, because of a lack of incentives as well as perceived costs and risks to privacy, security, and sovereignty [2].

The challenge of water data management, therefore, presents a classic public goods collective action problem, since the benefits of good water data management accrue primarily to secondary users rather than the data producers themselves. While some cost and risk concerns can be addressed with modern data infrastructure, a broad shift in norms and behavior across public agencies and utilities will be essential to enable the technical transformation necessary to maximize the power of water data.