A new collaboration uniting 10 countries across the European Union is helping to make data more interoperable to connect water stakeholders for improved decision making.
Called the WATERVERSE, the project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe program with the aim to develop a Water Data Management Ecosystem (WDME).
“We want to prepare data in a standardized and interoperable way where we can ensure it is ready to be used for certain advanced applications using artificial intelligence,” says Siddharth Seshan, Scientific Researcher at KWR Water Research Institute, one of the project partners. “We can enhance the decision making for end-users. There is already a lot of answers available in the data — we need to find a way to connect the dots already with links.”
WATERVERSE is a three-year project and the kickoff meeting was recently held in Thessaloniki, Greece, hosted by the project’s coordinator, the Centre for Research & Technology. The three-year project will be demonstrated across six countries: Cyprus, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and the UK.
One of the core aims of the project is to ensure interoperability of data. This way, water sector data management practices and resources can be more accessible, affordable, secure, fair, and easy to use. Historically, this has proven a challenge, with different stakeholders protecting multiple legacy systems, often fueled by cybersecurity concerns.
The project will identify, extend, and integrate a wide set of data management tools to implement the WDME. One such open-source data exchange tool that will be used is FIWARE, whose interoperable and standardized interfaces for water sector end-users and solutions providers were previously demonstrated within the Fiware4Water (2019-2022) project.
Creating a Water Data Management Ecosystem
The WDME will be an E.U.-level ecosystem of services and tools that can allow end-users to achieve requirements, whereby the data is prepared, clean, processed, standardized, interoperable, and anonymized if needed.
One case study being coordinated by KWR in the Netherlands is a collaboration with Dutch utility PWN. To help better understand water quality and quantity of the IJsselmeer, the utility’s primary water source, access to the right data will help with future modelling.
The ambition is to enable PWN to access and bring together data from multiple stakeholders, from the government to the climate agency.
“This is one case that requires an advanced level of data management where we are trying to connect different silos,” adds Seshan. “There needs to be some form of data exchange. How can we create horizontal connections across different systems? The WATERVERSE initiative is looking into achieve this across sectors and projects, in a multidisciplinary way.”
