A Spatial Data Infrastructure Approach for the Characterization of New Zealand's Groundwater Systems

The future information needs of stakeholders for hydrogeological and hydro‐climate data management and assessment in New Zealand may be met with an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards‐compliant publicly accessible web services framework which aims to provide integrated use of groundwater information and environmental observation data in general. The stages of the framework development described in this article are search and discovery as well as data collection and access with (meta)data services, which are developed in a community process. The concept and prototype implementation of OGC‐compliant web services for groundwater and hydro‐climate data include demonstration data services that present multiple distributed datasets of environmental observations. The results also iterate over the stakeholder community process and the refined profile of OGC services for environmental observation data sharing within the New Zealand Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) landscape, including datasets from the National Groundwater Monitoring Program and the New Zealand Climate Database along with datasets from affiliated regional councils at regional‐ and sub‐regional scales. With the definition of the New Zealand observation data profile we show that current state‐of‐the‐art standards do not necessarily need to be improved, but that the community has to agree upon how to use these standards in an iterative process.