Capturing Scientific Knowledge for Water Resources Sustainability in the Rio Grande Area

This paper presents our experience in capturing scientific knowledge for enabling the creation of user-defined modeling scenarios that combine availability and use of water resources with potential climate in the middle Rio Grande region. The knowledge representation models in this project were created and validated by an international, interdisciplinary team of scientists and engineers. These models enable the automated generation of water optimization models and visualization of output data and provenance traces that support the reuse of scientific knowledge. Our efforts include an educational and outreach component to enable students and a wide variety of stakeholders (e.g., farmers, city planners, and general public) to access and run water models. Our approach, the Integrated Water Sustainability Modeling Framework, uses ontologies and light-weight standards such as JSON-LD to enable the exchange of data across the different components of the system and third-party tools, including modeling and visualization tools. Future work includes the ability to automatically integrate further models (i.e., model integration).