2026-09-03 –, Conference Management Room6
Geoconnex links hydrologic data across many government agencies in the United States as a knowledge graph, published in accordance with W3C Spatial Data on the Web best practices. This session will provide an overview of Geoconnex and how to access its data using either SPARQL, OGC API Features, or GeoParquet.
The United States, like many other countries, has many water data providers at both the federal and local levels. These agencies have diverse APIs with a variety of access patterns, making it difficult for researchers to synthesize insights across agencies. Geoconnex, a software initiative funded by the United States Geological Survey, aims to solve this data access challenge by linking hydrologic features into a knowledge graph. Instead of needing to access dozens of specific agency APIs, a user can quickly find all monitoring locations and datasets associated with a river by running a graph database query or accessing the Geoconnex Explorer web UI. This talk will go over how Geoconnex leverages standards like RDF and OGC API Features, how the graph is created via the Geoconnex crawler and data pipeline, and the various ways you can access data from the graph including SPARQL, OGC API Features, or GeoParquet. Attendees will learn a variety of W3C Spatial Data on the Web best practices that are broadly applicable to other geospatial data integration tasks.
A general overview of Geoconnex can be found at https://internetofwater.org/geoconnex/
You can visually explore data within Geoconnex by going to https://explorer.geoconnex.us/
Technical documentation for the Geoconnex system can be found at https://docs.geoconnex.us/
Indicate what is (are) the open source project(s) essential in your talk:This project will focus upon Geoconnex, which itself is a fully open source data product. The data is currently deployed using the open source graph database, Qlever. In addition to the database itself, this presentation will discuss the geospatial API server pygeoapi, as well as a variety of data engineering tools like Dagster and geoparquet-io which help to power the data pipeline.
I make my conference contribution available under the CC BY 4.0 license. The conference contribution comprises the abstract, the text contribution for the conference proceedings, the presentation materials as well as the video recording and live transmission of the presentation:
Colton is a software engineer for the Center for Geospatial Solutions at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge Massachusetts, USA. He works on a variety of backend and data engineering tasks related to water data.