The Western Water Data Hub (WWDH) is an initiative designed to simplify access to water-related time series data across the Western United States by providing a unified, standards-based interface implementing the OGC API Environmental Data Retrieval (EDR) standard. A key goal of the project is to demonstrate how a real-world standards based API—like EDR—can streamline access to heterogeneous time series data from disparate systems in real time.

Developed through a collaboration between the US Bureau of Reclamation, the Center for Geospatial Solutions, and the Western States Water Council, the WWDH integrates multiple data sources by leveraging pygeoapi with custom EDR plugins. This architecture enables users to access real-time data from a diverse set of existing APIs, through a consistent interface.

A distinctive feature of the WWDH is its ontology abstraction layer, which facilitates the semantic resolution of parameters. By defining source specific vocabulary terms with ontologic matches in the Observations Data Models 2 (ODM2) vocabulary, the platform enables meaningful cross-source comparisons. Users can discover and query data based on standardized parameter names and units, even when underlying systems use inconsistent terminology.

This session will discuss the merits of implementing EDR as well as share lessons learned from implementing it in environments with legacy APIs, including challenges around latency, caching, parameter harmonization, and semantic alignment. Attendees will also see live demonstrations of how to access and retrieve water data through the hub’s EDR API. This session will also cover both the technical implementation and practical benefits of the WWDH. It will highlight how standards-driven development with OGC API and semantic ontologies lower barriers to data interoperability and unlock new possibilities for water data integrations.