The American Water Resources Association (AWRA) held its Spring Specialty Conference on GIS and Water Resources from March 29-31, 2010 in Orlando, Florida. I had the privilege of attending this event to present a poster on using the Sajara software framework to manage hardcopy infrastructure plans. Azavea also prepared a paper for the conference proceedings to help utility organizations digitize their hardcopy documents and otherwise prepare them for integration in the Sajara software framework.
The AWRA Conference covered a diverse range of subjects involving the use of GIS in the water resources industry. There were presentations on hydrologic modeling, watershed delineation, data sharing, software interface development and land use applications, just to name a few. The poster session added topics such as coastal management, agriculture, community water systems, education and irrigation, as well as document management. Many of the organizations looking at Sajara to manage their infrastructure plans were also interested in using GIS for stormwater management applications, similar to what the Philadelphia Water Department is doing with phillystormwater.org.
The opening plenary session featured Jack Dangermond with additional details on his vision for GIS in the cloud” and web services to enable data sharing. He particularly referenced CUAHSI HIS (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc.), an organization representing over 100 United States universities. CUAHSI has received National Science Foundation support to develop a web API and the HydroDesktop software application. The desktop application has been released as open source and available at no cost to users to help them download and manage available water data. But the web API and the database behind it are most interesting parts of the project. CUAHSI harvests sensor feeds of water data from 1000’s of sites across the United States. This data is archived and made available through a SOAP interface Dangermond collaborated with David Maidment on a paper for the AWRA proceedings that outlined the integration of water resources data using GIS and the web more generally and the CUAHSI project specifically. Maidment is the Director of the Center for Research in Water Resources at the University of Texas in Austin and heavily involved in the CUAHSI project. Both of them were also part of a panel discussion on the future of water resources information.
In addition to discussing Sajara with various organizations, one of the highlights of the conference for me was a presentation by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers regarding GIS past, present and future for water resources applications. Part of their vision for the future includes augmented reality applications, enabled by smart phones, special glasses or potentially car windshields, which would augment the reality experience of approaching a well or other infrastructure asset, for example, with critical descriptive information, or even diagrams and engineering plans overlaid on the reality view. The potential for these projects is very exciting to me, particularly since the Philadelphia Department of Records recently received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities under its Digital Humanities Startup Grant program to develop an augmented reality application for PhillyHistory.org that would enable smart phone users to view historic photographs of the city as an overlay on their camera displays by simply pointing their smart phone cameras at selected buildings.
AWRA will be holding this year’s annual conference right here in Philadelphia beginning on November 1, 2010. They will be addressing regional topics of interest to Mid-Atlantic water resources organizations. Perhaps Azavea will see you there.







