What?
HydroShare is a system operated by The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science Inc. (CUAHSI) that enables users to share and publish data and models in a variety of flexible formats, and to make this information available in a citable, shareable and discoverable manner. HydroShare includes a repository for data and models, and tools (web apps) that can act on content in HydroShare providing users with a gateway to high performance computing and computing in the cloud.
With HydroShare you can: share data and models with colleagues; manage access to shared content; share, access, visualize, and manipulate a broad set of hydrologic data types and models; publish data and models and obtain a citable digital object identifier (DOI); aggregate resources into collections; discover and access data and models published by others; use the web services application programming interface (API) to programmatically access resources; and use integrated web applications to visualize, analyze and run models with data in HydroShare.
Who?
HydroShare is freely accessible to everyone, but primarily was designed for water-resources professionals, researchers, educators, and others interested in water-resources data and tools.
Why?
The goal of HydroShare is to advance hydrologic science by enabling the water-resources community to more easily and freely share products resulting from their research and/or data collection. With Hydroshare, one can Integrate information from multiple sources; re-use data beyond the purpose for which it was originally collected, extending the value of measurement, monitoring and research investments; manage, archive, and publish data in a discoverable manner; increase transparency and support reproducibility of work.
How?
HydroShare has been, and continues to be, developed through collaborative grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The primary grants supporting HydroShare development were NSF awards ACI-1148453 and ACI-1148090 (2012-2017). Operation is currently through an NSF award to CUAHSI (EAR-1338606) and ongoing development through NSF collaborative awards OAC-1664061, OAC-1664018, and OAC-1664119 (2017-2021). The HydroShare development team is led by David Tarboton at Utah State University. Refer to the team page to see a listing of team members and contributors. HydroShare is open source, and built on open source software. HydroShare source code is collaboratively developed using repositories in Github and primarily uses Python, Django and iRODS technology. We are happy to consider code contributions from anyone but generally ask that coding ability and plans be discussed with us before giving commit access to the GitHub repository. Use of the code from GitHub should be done according to the terms of the three clause BSD Open Source license.
Content that can be shared within HydroShare is diverse, including digital objects that represent multiple hydrologic data types, models and model instances, documents, and other content types commonly used in hydrologic research. These include hydrologic time series, geographic features (vector data), geographic rasters (gridded data), multidimensional space-time data sets (e.g., NetCDF), and composite resources that represent complex datasets such as river geometry. Model Programs and Model Instances are additional types of content that can be shared and manipulated within HydroShare.
A “resource” is the discrete unit of digital content within HydroShare and is the unit used for management and access control within HydroShare. As such, resources become the social objects around which users collaborate. Resources can be created, modified, versioned, shared, annotated, discovered, and accessed. HydroShare resources have the following properties:
- A resource may consist of a single content file (e.g., in the case of a file containing a single hydrologic time series) or may be an aggregation of multiple content files (e.g., in the case of a hydrologic Model Instance with various input files necessary for model execution).
- A resource containing multiple content files may have a hierarchical file/directory structure.
- A resource may conform to a standardized content data model that is specific to a particular resource type and may define specific file formats, syntax, and/or file hierarchies.
- A resource is described by resource-level metadata designed to include generic information required for all resources and extensions that are specific to each particular resource type.