Observing Water-Related Events for Evidence-Based Decision-Making

The water sector is facing rapid development towards the smart digitalisation of resources, much motivated and supported by the UN’s global initiative for the Sustainable Development Goal 6. In that context, the efforts to address the specific challenges related to water management data and priorities multiply globally. There are several “digital twin” systems dedicated to water, each of which focuses on the different aspects of the digitalisation of signals to support water management companies, as well as water “observatories”. These are usually meant as Geographical Information Systems that showcase the different aspects of water resources through time. Within the scope of the European Commission-funded project NAIADES [1] focusing on the automation of the water resource management and environmental monitoring, we propose a slightly different approach that integrates heterogeneous data sources to try and solve common research questions, as well as to support water management companies in their current problems. This solution is named NAIADES Water Observatory (NWO), available at naiades. ijs. si, putting together:(i) real-time information from multilingual world news on water topics;(ii) data visualisation of water-related indicators through time, sourced from the datasets associated with the Sustainable Development Goal 6 (water) and other UN data (see Figure 1); and (iii) scientific knowledge from published biomedical research on water-related topics (eg, water contamination). Due to the rapidly growing awareness of the sustainability challenges that we are facing in Europe and worldwide in the context of water resource …