Less water, more data: Open or not?

Ten years ago, I wrote about the implications and opportunities behind the decision of an Australian state to open data about water management. Today, I decided to celebrate again the importance of transparency about water with a micro overview of the current status of this issue. Here are the most interesting results from a 5 minutes online search, with my final comment:

Random sample of water-related Open data sets

• Utah’s Open Water data
• Some datasets on Water Bodies in Northern Ireland
• the “Water” results of the EU Open Data portal
• 1.4k water-related data sets by the California Natural Resources Agency
• Water Quality data at the Global Open Data Index

And if you want to know more about Open Data about Water…

You may read how “Open Data Can Lead to Smarter Water Management” or watch a video on improving Open Data use in water management in Middle East and North Africa. The first web page is not really or necessarily actual Open Data. But I feel it is still on topic, and important, to show the potential of the real open data approaches to water management. The video, instead, gives a first, useful look to a global problem from a non-western perspective.

My conclusions?

Obvious, but sharing them cannot hurt:

• Access to clean, drinkable water is a really basic human right
• Water was scarce in many parts of the world in 2010, and today is even scarcer, or about to be scarcer
• Fair management of water becomes more critical every year
• Today there are online much more Open Data sets about water than there were ten years ago. But still much less than needed…
• and above all, from what I can see in the world, those datasets are not used by non-geeks as they should. Far from it. Even this is not news of course. Everybody who understands Open Data realized years ago that the number of published data sets is a really poor figure of Open Data effectiveness
• my final remark is a quote from one of the pages linked above, expanded: “Much of water management is increasingly data-driven”… but way too little is Open Data driven

Image source: screenshots of Right to Water