An open data movement appears to be taking hold within state government programs that manage water data.
On Friday, the State Water Resources Control Board hosted a standing-room-only "data fair" at CalEPA headquarters in Sacramento where experts discussed how to move forward with data sharing, both internally and with the public.
The kickoff event, moderated by Greg Gearheart, deputy director of Information Management and Analysis for the State Water Board, was a prelude to a Data Innovation Challenge next month that will invite the public to create data visualizations from a dozen water-related data sets soon to be available on the state's GreenGov open data portal.
Since taking the job a year and a half ago, Gearheart said one of his aims has been to begin building the foundation for an open data culture at the water boards.
"My goal is to expand this discussion with other agencies that are water-related," Gearheart said.
CalEPA, state chief geographic information officer Scott Gregory, the Government Operations Agency and the Department of Water Resources also are involved.
Jim Bohon, CalEPA assistant secretary for local program coordination and emergency response, said the data fair is a great idea that hasn't been seen at CalEPA before.
Bohon said CalEPA tried to launch a data sharing initiative in 2006, but it stalled after stakeholders had a tough time standardizing data definitions.
But the agency seems to be making some strides. CalEPA recently implemented a new data warehouse system that combines information from five different systems: California Environmental Reporting System (CERS), EnviroStor, GeoTracker, California Integrated Water Quality System (CIWQS) and Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).
"From Cal EPA's perspective, it's just the beginning," Bohon said.
Gearheart said the State Water Board's open data initiative is multi-phased and will eventually "wrangle" the URLs for 20 different enterprise data systems into a single machine-readable "Open Data Corral." More data sets will be added as time goes on. Gearheart mention one example: a trove of California water rights data available only on Microfiche will be digitized.
Stuart Drown, deputy secretary for innovation and accountability at the Government Operations Agency, said the water data is part of a second cohort that will be federated within a statewide open data portal that's being developed.
