Water Analytics and Management with Real-time Linked Dataspaces
3
university building and a school. Section 7 discusses related literature and Section 8
provides a brief summary of this chapter.
2 Motivation
Sustainability requires information on the use, flows, and destinies of energy, water,
and materials including waste, along with monetary information on environmental
costs, earnings, and savings. This type of information is essential if we are to
understand the causal relationships between the various actions that can be taken,
and their impact on sustainability. However, the problem is broad in scope, and
the necessary information may not be available, or difficult to collect. Within the
context of water management, improving the sustainability of water consumption,
especially through changing the way a household, organization, or city operates [6].
This requires a number of practical steps that will include the need for a systematic
approach for information-gathering and analysis.
2.1 Contextual Water Management
One of the key problems of modern water management systems is the lack of data
management and decision support tools that present meaningful and personalized
information about usage, pricing, and availability of water in an intuitive and
interactive way to end-users. This introduces limitations in the efforts to manage
water as a resource, including:
• User Awareness: End-users do not have access to water information (i.e. availability, consumption, and pricing) at the moment water consumption decisions
are being taken.
• User Incentives: Due to billing, pricing, awareness, or metering aspects, endusers may not have an incentive to change their behavior.
• Integrated Information Provision & Analysis: Decision makers do not have
access to information platforms to make organizational changes. Personalized
water information can only be created by combining publicly available water data
with private water usage data that is only available to water service providers.
• Benchmarking: End-users do not know if their individual water consumption
pattern is high or low compared to others.
2.2 Water Footprint & Water Information Ecosystems
The demand for business transparency is driving multinational companies towards
more holistic assessments of their water footprint and associated impact. By
3
university building and a school. Section 7 discusses related literature and Section 8
provides a brief summary of this chapter.
2 Motivation
Sustainability requires information on the use, flows, and destinies of energy, water,
and materials including waste, along with monetary information on environmental
costs, earnings, and savings. This type of information is essential if we are to
understand the causal relationships between the various actions that can be taken,
and their impact on sustainability. However, the problem is broad in scope, and
the necessary information may not be available, or difficult to collect. Within the
context of water management, improving the sustainability of water consumption,
especially through changing the way a household, organization, or city operates [6].
This requires a number of practical steps that will include the need for a systematic
approach for information-gathering and analysis.
2.1 Contextual Water Management
One of the key problems of modern water management systems is the lack of data
management and decision support tools that present meaningful and personalized
information about usage, pricing, and availability of water in an intuitive and
interactive way to end-users. This introduces limitations in the efforts to manage
water as a resource, including:
• User Awareness: End-users do not have access to water information (i.e. availability, consumption, and pricing) at the moment water consumption decisions
are being taken.
• User Incentives: Due to billing, pricing, awareness, or metering aspects, endusers may not have an incentive to change their behavior.
• Integrated Information Provision & Analysis: Decision makers do not have
access to information platforms to make organizational changes. Personalized
water information can only be created by combining publicly available water data
with private water usage data that is only available to water service providers.
• Benchmarking: End-users do not know if their individual water consumption
pattern is high or low compared to others.
2.2 Water Footprint & Water Information Ecosystems
The demand for business transparency is driving multinational companies towards
more holistic assessments of their water footprint and associated impact. By