October 04, 2008 –
Data collected through scientific inquiry and published in scholarly journals have always been available to others – if one knew where to look and had lots of time to search.
Today, more and more information is readily available to a diverse audience in online databases, aiding timely understanding and facilitating decision-making.
CalSWIM
UCI faculty members Crista Lopes and Stan Grant are developing CalSWIM, a Wiki-type Web platform that provides everyone from theoretical scientists to swimmers and surfers access to shared water data.
The California Sustainable Watershed/Wetland Information Manager (http://nile.ics.uci.edu/xwiki/bin/view/Main/) is designed both as a public forum and as a Web location, a place where professionals can publish and obtain data, as well as discuss different interpretations. Anyone can view pages, but publishing privileges require registration.
Contributors can upload images, Word documents, PDF files and Excel spreadsheets. They can also post blogs, view data in linked and continuously updated databases, and create maps, tables and charts.
Lopes, an informatics associate professor, and Grant, professor and chair of chemical engineering and materials science, began collaborating four years ago. The project was initially a traditional Web page, created to make water quality information from Newport Bay available to the public.
It didn’t take Lopes long to realize the site would be more effective with an open infrastructure that allowed access to professionals and volunteers alike, and offered advanced content-management features and up-to-date information.
“There are all these ad hoc groups of people that share information, usually by email or face-to-face. There is a need to share both the full-blown databases and also smaller pieces of information,” she says.
CalSWIM’s creators hope the site will attract volunteers as well as professionals.
A current statewide effort to investigate harmful algal blooms that release neurotoxins in the coastal ocean includes an army of volunteers collecting water samples. “Now, they can immediately upload their pictures to the site and automatically alert everyone to look at them,” Grant says.
The algal bloom project also evaluates data collected by sensors. “The idea is to leverage all of these different activities that might otherwise end up in a report on a shelf,” he says.
Because the site hosts scientific information, security is essential. Anonymity is taboo and contributors can be sure their data are safe. “This is not Wikipedia,” says Lopes, who is building security features into the site. “These are important data that sometimes need to be access-controlled.”
Wastewater Treatment
Betty Olson is using advances in information technology to improve access to water-quality data for wastewater-treatment managers.
The civil and environmental engineering professor developed a molecular methodology for tracking the sources of fecal waste in water, becoming interested in process control along the way. “So many processes in wastewater treatment are biological,” she says. “We have much better techniques to measure than we ever had before; it really advances the field, more so than we’ve seen in 150 years.”
These results can streamline processes, saving energy or reducing carbon footprints, but only if they are accessible. Olson is creating an online database that will display results from molecular and biological process experiments in a graphical user interface, which presents data as graphical icons and visual indicators, instead of text. The database will interact with databases at wastewater treatment facilities, an advance she hopes will lead to process improvements.
“My hope is that we’re going to be able to take this information and put it into different types of interfaces so that people running the treatment plants will be able to pull it up, put it alongside the physical and chemical properties they measure and [improve their efficiency].
“This allows us to take technologies that right now are in the university and make them usable everyday tools for people.”
Also, she adds, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on monitoring the quality of water and most of the data never sees the light of day. “All that information goes someplace and no one ever uses it. Making these data available is a step forward.”
— Anna Lynn Spitzer