About the project

The Geoconnex project is about providing technical infrastructure and guidance to create an open, community-contribution model for a knowledge graph linking hydrologic features in the United States, published in accordance with Spatial Data on the Web best practives as an implementation of Internet of Water principles.

In short, Geoconnex aims to make water data as easily discoverable, accessible, and usable as possible.

What is Geoconnex?

Geoconnex aims to enable a knowledge graph for water data in the United States. The value of this graph, (see https://graph.geoconnex.us) can be illustrated considering two use cases:

1. Indexing and discovering models and research from public sector, private sector, or academic projects about a particular place or environmental feature.
2. Building a federated multi-organization monitoring network in which all member-systems reference common monitored features and are discoverable through a community index.

See https://geoconnex.us/demo for a mockup of data discovery and access workflows that https://geoconnex.us aspires to enable.

Architecturally, Geoconnex involves:

1. A set of community-curated web resources about hydrologic reference features (e.g. watersheds, monitoring locations, dams, bridges, etc.) about which many organizations may collect and publish data.
2. Web resources about hydrologic features that organizations publish on the web, including embedded JSON-LD metadata, using common ontologies such as schema.org, and domain-specific ontologies such as HY-Features for hydrology and SOSA/SSN for sensor data. Guidance for embedded JSON-LD is under development at docs.geoconnex.us
3. A registry of persistent identifiers (PIDs) that point to the above resources. The PIDs in the geoconnex system have the base URI https://geoconnex.us/. Learn how to submit identifiers for the registry here: CONTRIBUTING. PIDs are important to maintain so that data publishers can change the URLs of their web resources while the knowledge graph and any search engine remain functional (preventing link rot).
4. A harvester that collects the JSON-LD published above, and publishes the resulting knowledge graph as both a public domain data product and an open API, allowing for the building of search interfaces. The harvester codebase is under development at harvest.geoconnex.us, and the knowledge graph itself will be available from graph.geoconnex.us

See the figure below:

What is in graph.geoconnex.us?

The features registered in https://geoconnex.us are automatically harvested and included in graph.geoconnex.us are either community reference features or associated with a particular organization or database.

1. community reference features: monitoring and environmental features collated by a person or group in the interest of the community. These features are available via OGC API Features at reference.geoconnex.us. See this R Shiny application for a simple map-based search interface for reference features.
2. organization specific features: features owned by a particular organizational entity or from a specific dataset.

Geoconnex.us-related presentations and publications.

• National Hydrography Infrastructure and Geoconnex
• New Mexico Water Data Initiative including geoconnex.us
• Roundtable presentation including geoconnex.us
• Second Environmental Linked Features Interoperability Experiment
• ESIP Sessions on Structured Data in the Web slides

Guidance for contributing PIDs and reference features is available here.

License

The contents of the geoconnex.us project are public domain. All contributors to the project dedicate their contribution to the public domain. For more information, see LICENSE.md.