Internet of Water Could Revolutionize Water Management

With the amount of water data collected every day, month and year in the United States, are we heading toward an IoW - Internet of Water? Melissa Edeburn investigates the shape of things to come.

The United States is awash in water data—the power of which has yet to be unleashed.

By Melissa Edeburn

To realize the dormant value of the data, say some producers and users, would require making them widely shareable in standardized digital formats, thereby allowing their real-time aggregation for a host of purposes beyond those that spurred their original collection.

They believe that opening the data and investing in water data infrastructure would set in motion a wave of innovation, leading to more sustainable management of our water resources. They envision creation of an Internet of Water.

Source: Duke

That project is the brainchild of representatives from government agencies, non-governmental organizations, agriculture, utilities, energy firms, technology firms, and software development firms working together through the auspices of the Aspen Institute Dialogue Series on Sharing and Integrating Water Data for Sustainability.

Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and the Aspen Institute partnered with the Redstone Strategy Group to convene the series in 2016 and 2017. The goal: to formulate a national digital water data and information policy framework for sharing, integrating, and disseminating public data to characterize and forecast the quantity, quality, and uses of water across the United States.

The Need for an Internet of Water

In the United States, water management is hindered by decision makers’ inability to answer three fundamental questions about our water systems in a timely way: How much water is there? What is its quality? How is it used (withdrawn, consumed or returned for different purposes)?

“It’s not that the data aren’t being collected,” said Nicholas Institute policy associate Lauren Patterson, who co-authored a report on principles and recommendations for creating the proposed Internet of Water. “The problem is that the data are scattered across multiple platforms with different standards, making them unusable except for the purpose for which they were collected. Rarely are they transformed into information that supports real-time decision making on a broad scale.”

Put another way, existing state, regional, and national data collection efforts focus on portions of the water cycle or a specific geographic region—not whole water systems—and coordination of those efforts is stymied by institutional barriers and norms that discourage data sharing.

“Our water world is data rich, but information poor,” said Martin Doyle, director of the Nicholas Institute’s Water Policy Program and a driving force in shaping the water data dialogue series. “If water data were shared openly and then integrated in a common digital platform, there would be game-changing opportunities ranging from private citizens’ ability to gauge the quality of local water to public officials’ ability to warn populations of water-borne public health hazards.”

Doyle and Patterson liken the emerging value of water data to that of transportation data. Integrating federal road data with state and local road data and pairing the resulting public road dataset with GPS, another public dataset, has made possible the development of private applications such as Google Maps and Waze that we use every day. The public data provides a context within which to incorporate non-governmental data and crowd-sourcing tools. Sharing and integrating water data could similarly revolutionize how we manage water resources.

Recommendations from the Dialogue Series

The dialogue series convened by the Nicholas Institute, the Aspen Institute, and Redstone culminated with three overarching findings that informed the proposed Internet of Water.

Source: Duke

First, water is undervalued—and water data even more so. Moving water from its source, treating it, and delivering it to faucets has a cost. Similarly, collecting data, “cleaning” or standardizing them, and delivering them to an end user has a cost. But unlike water utilities, most public agencies know neither the full cost of their data infrastructure nor the water and cost savings of putting the data to timely use. This blind spot has discouraged public agencies from further investing in data infrastructure.

“If the benefits of sharing water data in terms of meeting an agency’s mission and providing a good return on investment aren’t articulated for public agencies and organizations, they won’t direct already-allocated funds to making the data available,” said Patterson.

Second, there’s a need to make existing public water data more accessible. The data’s value in decision making is diminished if the data are hard to share across platforms. Thus, it is critically important that data, particularly at the local and state level, become more discoverable and usable.  The problem is that many state and local governments lack the resources to invest in data infrastructure.

Third, the appropriate architecture for an Internet of Water is a federation of data producers, hubs, and users—entities often isolated from one another. Initially, some overarching governance structure is needed to intentionally connect data hubs and to help coordinate adoption of shared metadata and data standards to ensure that data hubs can talk to one another.

Read full article: Duke

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Taxonomy

• Water
• Clean Tech
• Smart Grid
• Smart Meters
• Smart City
• Smart Metering
• Water Resources
• Water Monitoring
• Urban Water Infrastructure
• Water
• Smart Grid Analytics
• green infrastructure
• Green economy

2 Comments

1. Love to hear how the Internet of Water is helping us revolutionize the water sector and ideas of how it could have a more significant impact in the future!

2.        "Water resources" say?We must radically change our attitude towards water. Water is not resources, not a working reagent, but an unsolved, living matter.Ruthless exploitation of this matter leads to natural disasters and brings about a global cataclysm.The article in the annex is trying to draw the attention of scientists to a new view of water, to rebuild their attitude towards it.Start developing a new concept, a new "water policy" for preserving life on the planet.

   It is high time to look at water as a special kind of matter. Water is not just a fluid working reagent for production, energy generation, human needs. Its properties have not been disclosed so far. According to extensive materials on the properties of water, it can be determined that rotating in a continuous cycle of the cycle, water undergoes numerous transformations. The main essence of these transformations inherent in nature, or rather created by water itself, lies in its purpose. Millions of years of water formed in a single symbiosis with living beings and vegetation. It not only developed and promoted life on the planet, but itself is a derivative of biota. Her path has stabilized in the mandatory passage through food chains of flora and fauna. The way of water through juices, blood, secretions, breathing, transpiration provides its many and varied transformations. A single result of the transformations are evaporation from a great variety of biological objects. And each molecule of these vapors is an original construction, structure. Summing up in the clouds of the atmosphere, these molecules create a strictly individual program, precipitate in specified places and in specified volumes, developing each biota area with their doses at a given time. So the world order was polished, each territory had its own strict regime of water supply.

        Man, with his needs, began to use water for other purposes. Water lost its main element in its movement. Clouds - clouds - precipitation - transformations in organic - evaporation - clouds. In this chain, "transformations in organic" are rapidly declining with the development of civilization. Clouds - clouds - evaporation - clouds. Falling precipitation, it immediately evaporates from asphalt, arable land, artificial reservoirs. The total area of ​​the alienated territories is 67% according to open sources of information. Each hectare of fertile land contains 20 tons of underground living creatures, which converts the water of precipitation into pairs of respiration, excretion and evaporation through plant leaves.

         The man in communal and industrial processes produces even more reduced fumes. It must be assumed that the quality of the evaporation from the organic and from the asphalt is very different from each other. But, even without paying attention to this unproven, so far, fact, it is enough to take into account the increase in the volumes and rates of artificial fumes. There is also no exact data on such volumes and speeds. However, the logic of the above facts gives the right to the existence of such a hypothesis. The destroyed connections and the interaction of organic fumes have led to a change in all the laws of atmospheric transformation. Confirmation of this assumption is the current state of the climate. It's changing. There was a failure in the water supply system in the area. Somewhere downpours and floods, somewhere a drought and fires. Natural disasters in various parts of the world, warn humanity about the approaching cataclysm.

             Humanity, has gone on the wrong path, dealing with the private elements of the main cause - reducing the emission of carbon dioxide, "green technology" and so on small things. This intensively destroys the last areas under arable land, new reservoirs, new landfills and dumps.

         If a person has a desire to save the life of the planet, it is necessary to urgently develop a new concept for climate. It is necessary to restore the water to its natural functions. Stop all kinds of works with flooding new areas for new hydroelectric power stations, building canals and river turns, transferring to drip agriculture, planting roofs and walls of all buildings, and building new ones underground and under water. Stop the destruction of the soil. Eliminate dumps and dumps. Create a new ideology to reduce water consumption in all scales from production to each person. Otherwise, the planet will be swept away by humanity.

   2 Comment replies

   1. "... How can we better support the participants in order to find the right ways?"
         Well yes. The topic of the climate here is discussed quite actively. But. The proposed Climate Change Hypothesis, which I proposed, does not contain a single response. Hypotheses must be proven or destroyed. It is possible that this assumption is the surest way to mitigate the anthropogenic impact on the climate. We need an urgent association of specialists who can conduct scientific research and determine the reality of the new idea. Create a new concept in relation to water and start saving the planet.

   2. Yes, for us to avoid the tragedy of the Commons we must change how we do everything. The Water Network is an effort to innovate by knowledge sharing and bringing our collective intelligence to the problem. Thank you for your passion. Bringing great minds together to solve individual problems and think out of the box is our objective, and to share what has already been learned. How can we support the members better to find the right paths?