Active cooperation with OGC will ensure AQUARIUS software system has the highest support for OGC standards and is at the forefront of global water data exchange.

Vancouver, Canada, October 12, 2011 - Aquatic Informatics Inc., a global leader in providing innovative software solutions for water data management and analysis, today announced that it is working with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to create the next generation of standards for hydrologic data exchange.  In particular, AI is working in the following areas:

• The Domain Working Group for Hydrology.  This group is seeking technical and institutional solutions to the challenge of exchanging data describing the state and location of water resources, both above and below the ground surface. Through OGC papers and in cooperation with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), standards will be advanced to the ISO where appropriate.
• The Domain Working Group for Oceanography & Meteorology.  Meteorological and oceanographic data are multidimensional, continually evolving, highly spatial and highly temporal in nature. This group brings together OGC members in an open forum to work on oceanographic, meteorological and climatological data, metadata, and web services interoperability, greatly improving the way in which this information is described, shared and used.
• WaterML 2.0 Standards Working Group.  WaterML 2.0 is a candidate OGC encoding standard for the representation of in-situ hydrological observations data. This new standard will ultimately replace earlier formats such as WDTF (Australia), CUASHI (USA), and WaterML 1.1.  Aquatic Informatics will bring its extensive expertise in time series data storage to this effort to increase efficiency, extensibility and portability.

At this year's OGC technical meeting participants focussed on implementing and testing WaterML2.0 and OGC services within the context of Hydrology and Met applications. Looking forward, the challenge of OGC services within a real-time forecasting context was also considered.  The aim is to address the time and ensemble dimensions of a forecast, as well as services to facilitate incremental data updates and notifications to trigger data exchange capabilities.  The ultimate goal is to improve the overall availability of water data and the interoperability of water information systems for hydrologic research and water resource management. Many government agencies such as USGS, EC-WSC, NOAA/NWS and CSIRO are participating. Aquatic informatics will actively participate by serving data across the Canada-US border though its unique relationship with Water Survey Canada and the USGS.

About the Open Geospatial Consortium

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 438 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface standards. OGC® Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. The standards empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

About Aquatic Informatics

Aquatic Informatics™ provides software solutions that address critical water data management and analysis challenges for the rapidly growing environmental monitoring industry. Aquatic Informatics is focused on providing software solutions to a range of different customer groups including  federal, state/provincial and local government departments, hydropower operators, watershed and basin authorities, irrigation districts, mining companies, academic groups and consulting and engineering organizations, who collect, manage and process large volumes of water quality or quantity data.

For more information about Aquatic Informatics, go to www.aquaticinformatics.com/media.