Host: Matthew Klein
Guest: Peter Colohan | Director, Internet of Water | Center for Geospatial Solutions
Category: 🌐 Digital | Internet of Water
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[1:15] “The Internet of Water is a fascinating new idea that's been around for about four years. […] And it's sort of an emerging partnership with the federal government to bring about essentially a new public good, which is effectively a superhighway for sharing water data that's public to engage in sort of digital transformation of water data.”
[3:11] “We are trying to overcome the problem of what we call FAIR data - findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable data. So we want everyone who is publishing data, to publish it in such a way that we can all find it and discover it. That is if you want it found that's important. So we don't mean to reveal all water data by any stretch, we only are handling the data that has already been made public. […] The Internet of Water sounds a little bit like the Internet of Things. We are not actually attaching sensors, though we would partner with those who do to help manage the sensor data.”
[4:42] “We work with the full range of water datasets and even water related datasets like land use datasets. […] The data that we manage can come from a utility from a state or from the federal government. Mostly we are handling things like hydrology data, we're handling things like water use data, we're handling even census data to show the connectivity with demographic information, and so forth.”
[5:52] “We are working with our partners, a group called EPIC, the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, to help publish public water system boundaries. This is actually a really important data set for utilities for really, for all kinds of purposes. […] The boundary of the water system changes […] every year basically, or it may be even more frequently than that. […] But it's very difficult to find. That's one of the most major gaps in our knowledge […]. So we're encouraging work around the digitization, and publishing of public water systems and boundaries, so people can know exactly where the boundary of their water system is, and then use that for all kinds of different analytical purposes.”
[8:22] “As the Internet of Water evolves, the general public will be able to discover more and more data online simply by doing a plain language search on your favorite search engine. […] The idea of our technology is that we want to allow Google or Bing to find more information about water that's available already publicly, but it's not yet been digitally transformed, not yet in a web service, not yet API ready.”
[23:17] “Water information is about 10 to 15 years behind, say other sectors, like even weather data. And the reason for that is because the United States has the National Weather Service, which is responsible for producing weather forecasts. But it also has this fabulous private sector weather enterprise that engages in all of this digital transformation in partnership with the weather service. And the reason that that happens is because there is private demand. There is a market signal for weather information. And that's not quite the same water.”
Rating: 💧💧💧
🎙️ Full Episode: Spotify | Google
🕰️ 55 min | 🗓️ 06/01/2022
✅ Time saved: 53 min
Additional Links:
The Internet of Water Coalition
