Abstract
Hydroinformatics, as an interdisciplinary domain that blurs boundaries between water science, data science and computer science, is constantly evolving and reinventing itself. At the heart of this evolution, lies a continuous process of critical (self) appraisal of the discipline’s past, present and potential for further evolution, that creates a positive feedback loop between legacy, reality and aspirations. The power of this process is attested by the successful story of hydroinformatics thus far, which has arguably been able to mobilize wide ranging research and development and get the water sector more in tune with the digital revolution of the past 30 years. In this context, this paper attempts to trace the evolution of the discipline, from its computational hydraulics origins to its present focus on the complete socio-technical system, by providing at the same time, a functional framework to improve the understanding and highlight the links between different strands of the state-of-art hydroinformatic research and innovation. Building on this state-of-art landscape, the paper then attempts to provide an overview of key developments that are coming up, on the discipline’s horizon, focusing on developments relevant to urban water management, while at the same time, highlighting important legal, ethical and technical challenges that need to be addressed to ensure that the brightest aspects of this potential future are realized. Despite obvious limitations imposed by a single paper’s ability to report on such a diverse and dynamic field, it is hoped that this work contributes to a better understanding of both the current state of hydroinformatics and to a shared vision on the most exciting prospects for the future evolution of the discipline and the water sector it serves.
Highlights
This widening of disciplinary communities resulted in changes to the scope of the work presented at conferences, for example, from purely technical approaches to managing demand for water to socio-technical approaches where customer engagement is sought through, technical means, and by combining behavioral and data science
These data streams may range from data collected by smartphone embedded sensors, to information posted on social media, to data collected by, soon to be available, autonomous vehicles—cross referenced and linked to open environmental data, utility sensors and remote sensed information from new satellite networks (like NASA’s Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission scheduled to start by 2021 [107]
By the very nature of smart systems, customers adopting them share detailed information about their water usage with the utility, which is used to better assess the demand and manage the entire system. This information sharing potentially exposes customers to privacy invasions with the main concern being the limited control over personal data by an individual, which can result in a range of negative or unintended consequences
Summary
The water cycle is a system characterized by inherent complexity, variation, and uncertainty due to interlinked social, natural and engineered subsystems. It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the depths of hydroinformatics philosophy and approaches, the discipline can be thought of as a continuous process of developing and using water data, models and tools, to understand the environment, to engage all stakeholders, and help make decisions that improve society This is a highly iterative process (Figure 1), because, as stated in Vojinović and Abbott [6], “hydroinformatics integrates knowledges from the social and technical domains to create so-called conjunctive knowledges, that are concerned with an understanding of how technical interventions have social consequences and how the resulting social changes in turn generate new technical developments”.
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