Bogota's river basin hydrologic digital data library

Abstract

Strong efforts are directed nowadays towards making scientific information accessible to everyone. The amount of data available is immense, but raw data isolated from an information system could lose its value. Data acquisition is followed by quality controls in order to make it useful for physical or data-driven models. Nonetheless, distribution and accessibility of the final products is imperative in order to exploit them for science advancement purposes. Assimilation, calibration and rectification are the steps which data has to go through before it is distributed in multiple scientific formats. As a result of increasing data availability there has been an impressive improvement in computational models, along with better time and space sampling and enhanced software and hardware capabilities. In this light, this project is aimed at making the Hydrologic Data of the Corporation of Municipalities in Bogotá’s River Basin available for the science community. Our goal is to build a digital library that offers online access to the data given the premises of persistence, scalability, independence and self-description. This could be a first step in building a Hydrologic Information System for the basin. In the first chapter of this thesis, the importance of Hydrologic Information Systems in general and the Hydrologic Data Library for the Bogotá’s River Basin is outlined. The second chapter reviews different ongoing efforts to organize, distribute and analyze scientific data. Chapter three reviews the underlying computational technologies used for building information systems, in particular those used in this project. Chapter four explains the design and building process of the digital data library along with minor deployment technicalities. Chapter five exposes its shortcomings, future extensions and practical uses.