The HydroShare Collaborative Repository for the Hydrology Community

HydroShare is an online, collaboration system for sharing of hydrologic data, analytical tools, and models. It supports the sharing of, and collaboration around, “resources” which are defined by standardized content types for data formats and models commonly used in hydrology. With HydroShare you can: Share your data and models with colleagues; Manage who has access to the content that you share; Share, access, visualize and manipulate a broad set of hydrologic data types and models; Use the web services application programming interface (API) to program automated and client access; Publish data and models and obtain a citable digital object identifier (DOI); Aggregate your resources into collections; Discover and access data and models published by others; Use web apps to visualize, analyze and run models on data in HydroShare. This presentation will describe the functionality and architecture of HydroShare highlighting our approach to making this system easy to use and serving the needs of the hydrology community represented by the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI). Metadata for uploaded files is harvested automatically or captured using easy to use web user interfaces. Users are encouraged to add or create resources in HydroShare early in the data life cycle. To encourage this we allow users to share and collaborate on HydroShare resources privately among individual users or groups, entering metadata while doing the work. HydroShare also provides enhanced functionality for users through web apps that provide tools and computational capability for actions on resources. HydroShare’s architecture broadly is comprised of: (1) resource storage, (2) resource exploration website, and (3) web apps for actions on resources. System components are loosely coupled and interact through APIs, which enhances robustness, as components can be upgraded and advanced relatively independently. The full power of this paradigm is the extensibility it supports. Web apps are hosted on separate servers, which may be 3rd party servers. They are registered in HydroShare using a web app resource that configures the connectivity for them to be discovered and launched directly from resource types they are associated with.

Plain Language Summary
HydroShare is a web based hydrologic information system designed to enhance collaboration within the hydrology community through data sharing. Advancing hydrologic understanding requires combining information from multiple sources, which requires collaboration and working as a team or community. HydroShare is a computer system that supports this by enabling users to share units of content referred to as “resources” that hold either data or hydrologic computer models in standardized formats. HydroShare can thus serve as a repository for hydrologic information. This presentation will describe the functionality and architecture of HydroShare highlighting our approach to making this system easy to use and serving the needs of the hydrology community. HydroShare strives to make it easy for users to have their resources well described with metadata (data about data) by collecting this information automatically or having easy to use interfaces for metadata entry. HydroShare also attracts users by providing useful functionality in the form of web apps (computer programs accessed through a web browser). The system is flexible in that web apps can be set up on any web servers to access HydroShare resources, making the system extensible.

Tarboton, D. G., R. Idaszak, J. S. Horsburgh, D. P. Ames, J. L. Goodall, A. Couch, R. P. Hooper, P. K. Dash, M. Stealey, H. Yi, C. Bandaragoda, A. M. Castronova and The HydroShare Development Team, (2017), \"The HydroShare Collaborative Repository for the Hydrology Community,\" Abstract IN12B-02 presented at 2017 Fall Meeting, AGU, New Orleans, Mississippi., 11-15 Dec, https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm17/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/298088.