The results of a public voting process have confirmed that the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has decided to adopt WaterML 2.0 as an official OGC standard for hydrological time series encoding.

KISTERS has been actively involved in the OGC Hydrology Domain Working Group (HDWG) in charge of developing WaterML 2.0 for many years and is proud to see that the long-term effort has paid out.  The purpose of the HDWG is to provide a venue and mechanism for seeking technical and institutional solutions to the challenge of describing and exchanging data that describes the state and location of water resources, both above and below the ground surface.  WaterML 2.0 pushes data interoperability into new dimensions. Even though initially developed for use in the water world, the standard remains sufficiently generic to allow its application to data originally produced for different purposes. Interoperability is the goal of WaterML 2.0, whether it’s cross-department, cross-organization or cross-boundary. Whenever it comes to exchanging data in a well-defined and manufacturer-independent manner, WaterML 2.0 provides the right set of features.

Stefan Fuest, Web and GIS Manager for KISTERS, says “When I joined the OGC HDWG in 2009, I did so because of the group’s global coverage and the well-defined standardization procedures within the OGC.  I am excited to see WaterML 2.0 become the new OGC standard for hydrologic data exchange.  The interoperability experiments were critical to the development of the standard and we will continue to transfer the knowledge and experience we have gained as an OGC member to the market.  WaterML has been implemented in our WISKI software for almost 2 years now.  I encourage people and organizations around the world to take advantage of the WaterML 2.0 format and to continue to build upon it to increase the interoperability between all systems.”

The process of standardizing WaterML 2.0 started in 2009/2010 with a 'Harmonization Paper', followed by a 'Specification Document' in 2011/2012.  As an active long-term supporter of open standards KISTERS has provided both its unique global experience in hydrology, as well as specific expertise in time series data management during the development and testing phases of WaterML 2.0.

Now that WaterML 2.0 has been chosen as a standard other regional formats that have been developed, like the Water Data Transfer Format (WDTF) in Australia, the WaterOneFlow and WaterML 1.0 developed by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) in the U.S., the xHydro standard in Germany, and the EA XML standard in the United Kingdom may soon be replaced.  “In my opinion, the standardization of WaterML 2.0 is truly a watershed event that stands to define the future of data sharing in the hydrology community”, says Fuest.

Please refer to http://www.waterml2.org/ for more details about WaterML2.