2
Umair et al.
1 Introduction
One of the sustainable development goal set out by the United Nations, as part of
its agenda for 2030, is to ensure availability and sustainable management of water
and sanitation for all [12]. Furthermore, recent projections by the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development estimate that more than 40% of the
world’s population will be living in areas under severe water stress by 2050 [25].
This problem is expected to worsen due to a high global demand for water from
manufacturing, thermal electricity generation and domestic use. Commercial uses
of water are depleting the world’s freshwater supply in both quantity and quality. A
key factor contributing towards scarcity of water is the historical belief that water
is not a vital resource that needs to be managed. Nonetheless, a recent study has
highlighted the effects of water scarcity on economic growth [17]. The same study
also recommends conserving water through increased efficiency in existing uses.
This underlines a significant opportunity for research and development of ICT tools
to raise awareness, improve management, and increase conservation of water [26].
In order to manage water holistically, it is important to use decision support
tools that present meaningful and contextual information about usage, pricing,
and availability of water in an intuitive and interactive way. Different users have
different information requirements to manage water, from home users managing
their personal water usage, business users managing the water consumption of
their commercial activities, to municipalities managing regional distribution and
consumption at the city level. In order to develop water information services for
such diverse users, it is necessary to leverage knowledge from across a number
of different domains, including metering, collection and catchment management,
environmental, water quality, energy usage, utility information, end-user feedback,
occupancy patterns, meteorological data, etc. However, many barriers exist to
interoperability across domains and there is little interaction between these islands
of information. The design of next-generation water information management
systems poses significant technical challenges in terms of information management,
integration of heterogeneous data, and real-time processing of dynamic data.
Linked Data technology leverages open protocols and W3C standards for sharing
structured data on the Web. In this chapter, we discuss the use of Linked Data
as an enabling technology for water data services. The objective of this approach
is to create an integrated well-connected Real-time Linked Dataspace [10, 16] of
information relevant to managing water in public spaces. Representing water usage
data within the Linked Data format makes it open; thus, allowing it to be easily
combined with data from other relevant domain silos. This chapter describes the
fundamentals of the Linked Data approach for water data services [5]; in addition,
it details a concrete implementation of this approach for water analytics in public
spaces. Section 2 motivates the need for contextual water information management.
Section 3 introduces the main concepts of the Linked Data approach. Section 4
details the architecture developed for enabling this approach, in the context of
Waternomics project. Section 5 describes the pilots used for testing and validation of
proposed approach. Section 6 details the water management applications designed a
Umair et al.
1 Introduction
One of the sustainable development goal set out by the United Nations, as part of
its agenda for 2030, is to ensure availability and sustainable management of water
and sanitation for all [12]. Furthermore, recent projections by the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development estimate that more than 40% of the
world’s population will be living in areas under severe water stress by 2050 [25].
This problem is expected to worsen due to a high global demand for water from
manufacturing, thermal electricity generation and domestic use. Commercial uses
of water are depleting the world’s freshwater supply in both quantity and quality. A
key factor contributing towards scarcity of water is the historical belief that water
is not a vital resource that needs to be managed. Nonetheless, a recent study has
highlighted the effects of water scarcity on economic growth [17]. The same study
also recommends conserving water through increased efficiency in existing uses.
This underlines a significant opportunity for research and development of ICT tools
to raise awareness, improve management, and increase conservation of water [26].
In order to manage water holistically, it is important to use decision support
tools that present meaningful and contextual information about usage, pricing,
and availability of water in an intuitive and interactive way. Different users have
different information requirements to manage water, from home users managing
their personal water usage, business users managing the water consumption of
their commercial activities, to municipalities managing regional distribution and
consumption at the city level. In order to develop water information services for
such diverse users, it is necessary to leverage knowledge from across a number
of different domains, including metering, collection and catchment management,
environmental, water quality, energy usage, utility information, end-user feedback,
occupancy patterns, meteorological data, etc. However, many barriers exist to
interoperability across domains and there is little interaction between these islands
of information. The design of next-generation water information management
systems poses significant technical challenges in terms of information management,
integration of heterogeneous data, and real-time processing of dynamic data.
Linked Data technology leverages open protocols and W3C standards for sharing
structured data on the Web. In this chapter, we discuss the use of Linked Data
as an enabling technology for water data services. The objective of this approach
is to create an integrated well-connected Real-time Linked Dataspace [10, 16] of
information relevant to managing water in public spaces. Representing water usage
data within the Linked Data format makes it open; thus, allowing it to be easily
combined with data from other relevant domain silos. This chapter describes the
fundamentals of the Linked Data approach for water data services [5]; in addition,
it details a concrete implementation of this approach for water analytics in public
spaces. Section 2 motivates the need for contextual water information management.
Section 3 introduces the main concepts of the Linked Data approach. Section 4
details the architecture developed for enabling this approach, in the context of
Waternomics project. Section 5 describes the pilots used for testing and validation of
proposed approach. Section 6 details the water management applications designed a