Addressing Flexibility, Performance, and Security Challenges in Developing the Bureau of Reclamation’s Information Sharing Environment (RISE)

The Bureau of Reclamation serves water to 31 million people and 20 percent of irrigators in the western United States. Reclamation generates large amounts of data and information describing reservoir operations, hydropower generation, environmental compliance, invasive mussels, infrastructure, and other aspects of Reclamation’s mission activities. Much of these data are currently managed and externally served using program-specific, legacy information management & technology (IMT) systems, often without modern features such as machine-readable data formats and web-services. The Department of the Interior's Open Water Data Initiative addresses these issues, and Reclamation is striving to improve its data-publishing efforts, making its data more easily found, accessed, and applied to support public and private sector activities.

This presentation provides an overview of two IMT systems that Reclamation has developed under OWDI: the Reclamation Water Information System (RWIS, https://water.usbr.gov/, released April 2017) and the Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE, first release expected Winter 2019). RISE development included enveloping RWIS and expanding data contents to include water quality, invasive mussels, hydropower, and other data subjects, as well as an expanded range of data types (from RWIS’ focus on time series to also including geospatial, binary, documents, and others). During this process, the development team encountered numerous technical challenges related to providing internal data acquisition flexibility in engaging Reclamation’s diverse community of data owners and programs, ensuring effective web-portal performance for public and private sector users, and assuring that various system security challenges were addressed. This presentation will highlight these various challenges as well as preview the upcoming release of RISE 1.0.