Water Cluster Telecons

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June 3 2010 Telecon

3 pm EST
Phone: Meeting Number: 877-326-0011
Meeting Code: *7884944*

Water Cluster Telecon – May 6, 2010

Present:

• Bill Sonntag
• Brian Rogan
• Louis Sweeny
• Bruce Bargemeyer
• Tim Gleason - EPA Region I
• Tom Shyka - Gulf of Maine Research Center
• Will Pozzi
• Chuck Spooner

Introduction of Participants

New Participants introduced themselves. Chuck Spooner introduced Tim Gleason and the reasoning behind his invitation to Tim to participate in the call.

Review of last call

Identified a use case that could be used for a tangible construct.

3 AIP-3 Gulf of Maine use case discussion Bill is looking for reaction to the document that he circulated by email. Text Follows:

Improving Access To Meteorological and Discharge Data

Business Need:
Managers have need to integrate weather data and water quality data to better understand meteorological relationships to water quality; Managers need site-specific meteorological information (rainfall) to improve decision making around closing/opening of shellfish beds and beach advisories; Shellfish monitoring programs could be improved by having access to more river/stream discharge/flow data; Managers need more timely rainfall data (last hour to last 24 hours) for beach monitoring programs.

Strengths:
 USGS Is working on tool that allows users to access weather data
 within an area of interest
 Could develop rating curves - not as expensive as maintaining stream
 gauges;
 Could use NextRAD radar output to extract real time rainfall data
 from specific location
 Could involve multiple partners who would use/provide data - MWRA, DH
 DES (beach) NWS modeling/forecasts;
 Leverage EPA's Virtual Beach Model, by potentially using EPA Exchange
 Network to access data needed to run model.

Concerns:
Currently don't have historical data for analysis;
 Monitoring limited/date and time not based on rainfall.

Additional Comments:
Beach monitoring programs need real time data to make predictive
 advisories (last hour to 24 hours)
 Beach monitoring programs need more consistent rainfall data to do
 analysis to see if predictive advisories can be done with rainfall,
 or if other parameters are involved
 Integrate periodic episodic storm events
 Discrete models/elasticity for variables is critical (drought before
 rainfall)
 Example: Integrate weather data with FOCB data - look at changes to
 WQ parameters with time - geospatially. Valuable for volunteers,
 analysis. Data has discrete dates, look at rainfall 24 hours before
 sampling, sunny, etc. Not full weather dataset - 24/48 summaries
 around sample times/locations. Might explain some of the variation -
 improve ability to explain deviations.

Tim gave a description of the work they are doing in Region I. Their work is being approached by the user end rather than the data end.

There are a number of questions involving this work and engaging users. EPA is unaware of where NOAA is regarding regional downscaling. It might be useful to bring in some NOAA people to the summer meeting who could address these concerns and understand their work efforts.

Bill talked with Luis Bermudez about organizing efforts in Knoxville to develop scenarios for three types of users. It needs to be come at it from the data side, science side and citizen side; a three user type engagement using semantic technologies.

• need to identify the data sources
• determine their current configuration and how they could be use in semantic tools
• how they can reside in a semantic inventory
• What type of tool can be used to display them?
• Need to see if we can use some of the quickly maturing semantic techniques to integrate the data in ways that would be most useful to a number of different users.

Bill spent time with Tim Hendler at RPI. They are using some fast paced demos that illustrate how quickly some of this work can be done. It was clear as to what was needed to get at the data and to find the right tools and it is doable over the next two and a half months.

Bruce noted that are a number of ideas that Luis put forward. He noticed that a lot of this is being done at Hydroseek and CUASHI. This has been put into Excel but not into OWL at this point. It has been done with physical chemistry and less so in other areas. He also talked with David Valentine but it has not been turned into an ontology at this point. They are putting them into SCOS format.

He also talked with SCISCOPE personnel as well. The SCISCOPE tool is set up for discovery and the ontology is embedded in it.

Will Pozzi discussed other efforts that he is aware of and noted that there are a lot of efforts underway internationally, particularly in Australia.

Louis noted that if we have practical ontologies attached to coastal management, we could have much better data management. He asked if any of these ontologies are veering into the administrative/programmatic domain? i.e. monitoring, permitting, etc. activities.

The value of ontologies is to make it more user friendly.

It might be worth thinking about getting the data out in an RDF consumable format. Start to use it and grab ontology formats that already exist that will work for whatever is being examined. Apply those into display tools that provide an interface to the decision maker on whatever particular question or interest they might have. Perhaps the data sources are more important to the questions being asked and answer the questions using a display and integration tool.

This process would work best for OEI and would benefit their current holdings.

It doesn’t need to be perfect to make it work. It may be that people will need to work on pieces and then see how the whole works. It isn’t clear how much can be done before the summer meeting.

Action

• Need to look at the paper that was sent around and determine what is needed.
• We need to look through the existing use case, see what data is available for it and determine what shape it is in
• can they be converted to a compatible format and made available to a limited *Construct an ontology from the datasets we want to use, rather than import an ontology into this work.

Preparation for Summer Meeting

There is still a need to determine what will be accomplished at the Knoxville meeting.

Other topics raised by participants

The next call will be the first Thursday in June, June 3 at 3 PM

Adjournment

Meeting ended at 3:58 PM