WHOS
WMO Hydrological Observing System
Categories: Florence | Anthropogenic impacts | In progress | International | Sharing Monitoring Technologies
Keywords: broker | DAB | hydrology | Interoperability | WMO
Funding: World Meteorological Organization
Period: July 2021 – June 2024
Total project budget:€ -
Total budget CNR IIA: € 60.000,00
Scientific Responsible: Enrico Boldrini

Abstract of the project

The goal of hydrological cycle observations is to gather data for use in water resources planning and decision-making, and more. Hydrological datasets have intrinsic value and are worth the enormous human and financial effort required to collect them over long periods of time. Their value is maximized when data is open, discoverable, accessible, and interoperable, enabling various end users to use and reuse it. It is essential that hydrological data management and sharing is done effectively to maximize the benefits of data collection and optimize reuse.
WHOS provides a service-oriented framework that connects data providers to consumers by building a hydrology system of systems that provides logging, discovery, and access capabilities to hydrology data on a global scale. In 2015 the WMO Congress supported the full implementation of WHOS.

The main activity consists in the realization, advancement and hosting of the WHOS brokering platform, through the use of the Discovery and Access Broker (DAB) technology developed and maintained by CNR-IIA. The brokering platform will allow a flow of data from the various suppliers (whether they are national water services, private companies, research bodies, basin authorities, ...) towards the final consumers (whether they are research bodies, decision makers, model makers, ...). WHOS data will also be able to flow to the WMO Information System (WIS), WMO's main data sharing system, thus contributing to an even greater dissemination of hydrological data.
The activity of CNR-IIA also includes other activities, including:
• Promote standardization in the hydrological community
• Support data providers and consumers to optimize hydrological data sharing
• WHOS web portal hosting
• Implementation and hosting of the WHOS hydrological ontology publishing service

WHOS goals include:
• Promote standardization of web service protocols and data formats and metadata for sharing hydrological data
• Support data providers and data consumers through personalized consultancy to optimize the publication and consumption of hydrological data
• Design of a system of systems based on the brokering approach for sharing hydrological data on a global scale
• Build, advance and host a central brokerage software platform
• Creation, advancement and hosting of a service for the publication of a hydrological ontology
• Creation, advancement and hosting of the WHOS web portal
• Creation of a WHOS website containing links to portals, documentation and bibliographic resources
World Meteorological Organization - WMO - United Nations
National Research Council, Institute on Atmospheric Pollution - CNR-IIA - Italy


Henry Boldrini
Robert Roncella
Fabrizio Papeschi
Massimiliano Olivieri
Matthias Santoro
Lena Rettori
Paul Mazzetti