Design and implementation of a web-based groundwater data management system

Understanding and managing groundwater resources requires the integration of large amounts of high quality data from different sources. With the recent advances in GIS, data storage, web-based applications, and visualisation technologies, groundwater data management has entered a new phase. Currently in Australia (like many other countries), hydrological and groundwater data are collected and managed by many agencies, scattered in various formats and locations, and cannot be easily accessed by the public. This paper elaborates on the overall process of developing a web-based groundwater data management system in support of a unified framework for groundwater data collection and management. This unified framework is to facilitate access to the dispersed collections of data. The goal of the data management system under development is to provide a platform for collecting, storing, and sharing monitoring data within a larger network of data providers and end users (e.g. researchers, field site managers, public). We describe the system architecture, the open source tools, and technologies used for implementation. The proposed system is flexible, accommodating different data types and sources, and can be expanded to include new field sites. Experience throughout the project demonstrates that ongoing communication among developers, field managers, and researchers, is essential to help resolve some of the technical/implementation problems and linguistic ambiguities that may arise throughout the data collection and automation process.