Using Python, Partnerships, Standards and Web Services to provide Water Data for Texans

Obtaining time-series monitoring data in a particular region often requires a significant effort involving visiting multiple websites, contacting multiple organizations and dealing with a variety of data formats. Although there has been a large research effort nationally in techniques to share and disseminate water related time-series monitoring data, development of a usable system has lagged. The pieces have been available for some time now, but a lack of vision,expertise, resources and software licensing requirements have hindered uptake outside of the academic research groups. The Texas Water Development Board is both a data provider and large user of data collected by other entities. As such, using the lessons learned from the last several years of research, we have implemented an expandable infrastructure for sharing water data in Texas. In this paper, we discuss the social, institutional and technological challenges in creating a system that allows discovery, access, and publication of water data from multiple federal, state, local and university sources and how we have used Python to create this system in a resource limited environment.