Applying water requirements into metadata in the era of SDGs and Essential Variables: semantics, quality parameters and discoverability in the GEM+

WQeMS aims to provide an operational Water Quality Emergency Monitoring Service to the water utilities industry in relation with the quality of the ‘water we drink’. This Copernicus service focuses on monitoring lakes for the delivery of drinking water and will provide open geospatial data products structured in Essential Water Variables. While Essential Climate variables are fully defined, a set of Essential Water Variables was proposed by GEOSS but was never fully adopted. In this communication we will present a metadata manager tool called GeM+ that adopts a general framework for Essential Variables (EV) that includes a renewed proposal for Essential Water Variables. EVs are included in a keyword library that relates them to SDG indicators. In addition, the GEM+ includes a library of quality measures defined in QualityML (that inherits and extends the UncertML approach) vocabulary that will be used and tested for the Water Quality Emergency Monitoring Service. The quality need for a vocabulary proposed by QualityML is now being adopted by the ISO 19157-3 proposal. GEM+ also implements the ISO 19115-1 approach for lineage (provenance) that allows to carefully document data product workflows used to create the geospatial products as a mechanism to describe the traceability, quality and reproducibility of the dada. Examples of water related dataset have been prepared showing how EVs, quality measures and provenance is used to semantically tag data, document quantitative quality estimations and present the sources and processes used to elaborate this Copernicus service candidate products. WQeMS has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101004157.