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Expanding Public and Private Sector Access to Reclamation's Water and Water-related Data
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  • Levi Brekke,
  • Allison Danner,
  • Kenneth Nowak,
  • Syd Poulton,
  • James Nagode
Levi Brekke
Bureau of Reclamation Denver

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Allison Danner
Bureau of Reclamation Boulder City
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Kenneth Nowak
Bureau of Reclamation
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Syd Poulton
Bureau of Reclamation Sacramento
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James Nagode
Bureau of Reclamation Denver
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Abstract

The Bureau of Reclamation serves water to 31 million people and 20 percent of irrigators in the western United States. Reclamation generates large amounts of data and information describing reservoir operations, hydropower generation, environmental compliance, invasive mussels, infrastructure, and other aspects of Reclamation’s mission activities. Much of these data are currently accessed on a program-specific basis via legacy information management & technology (IMT) systems, often without modern features such as machine-readable data formats and web-services. The Department of the Interior’s Open Water Data Initiative addresses these issues, and Reclamation is striving to improve its data-publishing efforts, making its data more easily found, accessed, and applied to support public and private sector activities. This presentation provides an overview of two IMT systems that Reclamation has developed under OWDI: the Reclamation Water Information System (RWIS, water.usbr.gov) and the Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE). RWIS was developed first as a pilot, demonstrating how multiple programs’ water data could be combined into a modernized data-publishing system. It provides free access to reservoir and water time series data from Reclamation’s five regions, includes map and query interfaces for data discovery and access, and web-services for automated retrieval. Based on the success of the RWIS pilot, Reclamation has more recently focused on developing RISE, which will envelop RWIS and feature a much larger collection of Reclamation data, including water quality as it pertains to Reclamation water management activities, invasive mussels, hydropower, and infrastructure, and more. RISE will also serve a mix of data types, going beyond RWIS’ scope of time series data to also include geospatial and documents data. This presentation summarizes RISE development approach, architecture and previews the upcoming release in Winter 2019.