Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE): Expanding Public and Private Sector Access to Reclamation's Water and Water-Related Data

The Bureau of Reclamation is a western U.S. water wholesaler, serving water to 31 million people and providing irrigated water to 20 percent of western U.S. farmers. Through these activities, Reclamation generates large amounts of water and water-related data, describing reservoirs and river system conditions, hydropower, environmental compliance activities, infrastructure assets, and other aspects of Reclamation’s mission activities. In order to address the Department of the Interior's Open Water Data Initiative, Reclamation aims to publish more of these data, making them more easily found, accessed, and utilized in decision support by the public and private sectors.

At the 33rd Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies, Reclamation shared about the development of the new Reclamation Water Information System (RWIS, water.usbr.gov). This system focused exclusively on tabular water data. The first RWIS release, launched in spring 2017, provides free access to reservoir and water time series data from Reclamation’s five regions and includes a map interface for sites identification, a query interface for data discovery and access, and web-services for automated retrieval. A second RWIS release is planned for 2018 and will include expanded data content (sites, period of record) and tools for improved data visualization and discovery.

Concurrent with RWIS enhancements, the development team is pursuing a broader vision of publishing a much larger collection of Reclamation data. This vision involves developing a new system – the Reclamation Information Sharing Environment (RISE) – to encapsulate RWIS and other water-related data, including environmental, hydropower, and infrastructure assets, among potential others. RISE will also serve mixed information types, going beyond tabular data to include geospatial and documents data. Planning and development began in spring 2017. The first RISE release is scheduled for Spring 2018, coincident with the second RWIS release. This presentation will summarize RISE development approach, architecture and preview the upcoming release.