Extending HydroShare to enable hydrologic time series data as social media

Abstract

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc. (CUAHSI) hydrologic information system (HIS) is a widely used service oriented system for time series data management. While this system is intended to empower the hydrologic sciences community with better data storage and distribution, it lacks support for the kind of 'Web 2.0' collaboration and social networking capabilities being used in other fields. This paper presents the design, development, and testing of a software extension of CUAHSI's newest product, HydroShare. The extension integrates the existing CUAHSI HIS into HydroShare's social hydrology architecture. With this extension, HydroShare provides integrated HIS time series with efficient archiving, discovery, and retrieval of the data, extensive creator and science metadata, scientific discussion and collaboration around the data and other basic social media features. HydroShare provides functionality for online social interaction and collaboration while the existing HIS provides the distributed data management and web services framework. The extension is expected to enable scientists to access and share both national- and laboratory-scale hydrologic time series datasets in a standards-based web services architecture combined with social media functionality developed specifically for the hydrologic sciences.