PROBLEM: The lack of accessible real-time and historical water-resources data has been identified as a major impediment to the ability of water-resources managers and researchers to make effective decisions to manage and protect water resources. Fortunately, there is a great deal of water-quality information collected for Lake Michigan by numerous agencies. However, it can be time-consuming and difficult to locate these data from existing sources, especially for a single watershed, and the data are often in a hard-to-use format.

Water-resources data have recently become more accessible through the Internet. The number of users of this information are increasing. However, many people don’t know what data are available or how to access these data. Often the data are not organized for easy use. A system is needed to organize and present the data in a common location and format that takes into account the requirements of various data users and data types. The data types include water-quality data, biological community and habitat information, streambed-sediment data, and ancillary data such as land use, surficial deposits, point sources, etc. Finally, new and innovative technologies need to be utilized in order to present specialized water-quality information in real time on the Internet.

Decisions based on readily-available data can be more effective, both from a cost and a managerial perspective, than the implementation of numerous site-specific studies or management actions. Data organized by watershed unit are the most useful.

PROPOSED WORK AND OUTCOMES: The project would develop and implement a pilot study to provide a unified data-access system and increased real-time water-quality information for the Lake Michigan drainages. The project would be completed in two phases as follows:

1. Create a pilot home page for the Milwaukee River Basin to illustrate the information that could be made available for any watershed.

A pilot home page on the Internet will be created for the Milwaukee River Basin. This will include introductory information on the watershed and on the data available and how to access it.

For the pilot, a limited amount of data will be available to users. Two methods of accessing information about the data available will be shown on the user’s Internet browser: 1) a map with the sampling sites plotted that, when a site of interest is selected ("clicked" on), the data available at that site will be printed to the screen; and 2) a queryable database populated with a limited amount of data, sorted by site and data type. The primary goal at this point is to show users the potential of this type of web- enabled database.

The data will be stored and managed in an Oracle 8 relational database management system. Internet access to the data will be enabled via Oracle’s Discover tool. Oracle Discover is a high-end ad hoc query tool, optimized for online analytical processing (OLAP). In addition, Formida FIRE will be used to perform map serving functions in combination with the Oracle spatial cartridge to improve performance of spatially-related queries. Automated systems of extraction, transformation, and loading of data to the data warehouse will be created and deployed using Oracle Datamart Builder software.

The Milwaukee River Basin is a good choice for the pilot effort because of the large population base and because there are already projects in the area that are developing Internet-accessible databases.

2. Contact stakeholders to determine their priority data needs.

Concurrent with the first step, potential data users will be contacted to determine their highest priority data needs. This information will be helpful in the development of the pilot home page and is critical to Phase II of the project.

3. Additional data will be added, beginning with those data identified in step 2 above.

4. Additional functionality will be added.

The use of the map server (Formida) will be expanded to provide query capabilities, other presentation features (such as graphs of data), and downloadable data will be a major focus in this phase. The goal will be to provide an intuitive, graphical map-based data query tool.

5. Begin to expand to other watersheds in the Lake Michigan Basin.

The concept is to develop home pages for all watersheds in the Lake Michigan Basin, beginning with those in the Western Lake Michigan drainages. At the same time new pages are being added, additional data and more sophisticated features will be added to exisiting watershed’s pages.

The budget for phase I will primarily come from Wisconsin DNR seed money to develop a pilot home page that will demonstrate some of the potential of Oracle and Formida software for serving data on the Internet. In subsequent years, it is envisioned that a combination of WDNR funds, USGS cooperative matching funds, USGS NAWQA funds, and other sources such as EPA, would be used to expand the coverage for Lake Michigan.