The WATERVERSE project is proud to announce the successful release of the first prototype of its Water Data Management Ecosystem (WDME), a cutting-edge suite of tools and services aimed at revolutionizing data management in the water sector. This milestone represents a significant step forward in advancing efficient and collaborative water data management solutions. WDME develops solutions that consider sector-specific approaches to effectively and affordably address the data management gaps to:

  • empower data sharing and interoperability;
  • increase the quality of data and metadata;
  • consider the domain data ownership and provenance culture;
  • analyse legal constrains and the applicable business models.

Innovative Tools for the Water Sector

The WDME prototype integrates a comprehensive array of functionalities designed to support the entire data management lifecycle and optimize data collection, harmonisation, processing, analysis and visualisation. It incorporates tools and services in a multi-layer architecture that caters to diverse needs across the water management spectrum, providing stakeholders with seamless and efficient access to actionable insights.

  • Data Collection Layer enables to acquire data from heterogeneous sources (sensing data, IoT, EO, SCADA, etc.);
  • Interoperability and Data Harmonisation Layer harmonises data relied on the data models aligned with the Smart Data Models program to represent them in an adequate format compliance to FIWARE NGSIv2 and ETSI NGSI-LD APIs, facilitating data sharing;
  • Data Management Layer stores and distributes harmonized data to other components and various third parties by delivering them to the Data Catalogue for Open Data (DCAT-AP);
  • Data Processing Layer elaborates the data by validating, cleaning, reconciling, anonymising, clustering them to generate added value for decision-makers;
  • Application Layer delivers the processed data to applications that handle cataloging, publicizing, and displaying it on various platforms, such as tools for data visualization and interactive dashboard creation;
  • Identity Access and Cybersecurity Cross-Layer manages the system’s security and identification aspects, providing user authentication and cyber-security solutions for the WATERVERSE services.

In parallel, the WATERVERSE FAIR Ecosystem has been developed by encapsulating the FAIR principles and Meloda5 dimensions and aiming to assess the fairness of digital objects in water-related data spaces. Moreover, a set of Waterverse FAIR Services has been developed to facilitate the adoption and improve of the metadata quality generated in the project with the objective of share Datasets and Data Services cross-border and cross-domain.

During the first pilot iteration, the WDME was rigorously evaluated at six pilot sites across Europe. These real-world tests provided valuable feedback from end-users, allowing the project team to identify areas for improvement and fine-tune the platform’s capabilities.

Alignment with the DSSC Blueprint

The WDME prototype also aligns with the Blueprint proposed by the Data Spaces Support Centre (DSSC) for creating Data Spaces. Many of its functionalities reflect the principles outlined in the Blueprint, ensuring compatibility with broader European initiatives to foster secure and collaborative data sharing across sectors.

The insights gained from the first pilot phase will guide the development of the second iteration of the WDME, focusing on refining and enhancing its capabilities to better serve Water Utilities needs. This release marks a pivotal moment in the WATERVERSE project’s journey toward creating smarter, more integrated water management systems that support sustainability and resilience.

Alignment with SEMIC
Semantic Interoperability Community (SEMIC) stands for co-creation and sharing best practices where the Support Center is also home to a community of adopters that share tooling, standards and good practices to promote semantic interoperability. The SEMIC community is responsible of the maintenance of DCAT-AP, a DCAT application profile for sharing information about Catalogues containing Datasets and Data Services descriptions in Europe as a first step for interoperability Europe. WATERVERSE is aligned with the definition of Datasets and Data Services defined in the last version of DCAT-AP 3.0 published on 14 June 2024.