Éric Boisvert 1, Boyan Brodaric2
1 Commission géologique du Canada division de Québec, Secteur des sciences de la Terre, Ressources naturelles Canada. 490 de la Couronne, Québec, QC, Canada
2 Geological Survey of Canada Central division, Earth Sciences Secteur, Natural Resources Canada, 615 Booth Street, Ottawa, ON, Canada
This document is a detailed description of GroundWater Markup Language (GWML). GWML is a GML (Geography Markup Language) application to exchange groundwater related information. It is an extension of another GML application - GeoSciML - designed to exchange geoscience (essentially geology) information (Duffy and Sen 2005). Therefore, GWML also borrows from Observation and Measurements (O&M : OGC 07-022r1) and Sampling Features (OGC 07-002r3) specifications. A more detailed list of conformances is given below.
GWML's scope is the geological aspect of groundwater, and technical details of wells and groundwater measurements. It covers, amongst other aspects:
It does not cover water quality beyond natural quality, for instance contamination by human activity and remediation is not specifically covered, but handled generically. Suface water is not modelled in any details (but just as very generic classes). Geochemistry is not modelled beyond result reporting using O&M, which exclude explicit details about sample manipulations, methodologies, etc. But this can be covered generically though O&M.
GWML has been designed according to the ISO-19103, ISO-19118 and ISO-19136 following the best practices developed in GeoSciML. This methodology allows inserting this development in the larger OGC framework and SOA architecture implied by such standards.
The methodology to create this model involves creating a UML representation, following the ISO profiles (ISO 19103), and importing all the external models that can be reused in the context of GWML. The UML representation can be converted into a W3C XSD schemas following the ISO-19118 guidelines, which prescribe a series of standard XSD constructs to represent all elements permitted in the ISO UML profile. The XSD schema defines the XML structure of a GML application and provides the validations mechanism to assess the syntactic conformance of a XML document. The XSD representation is a 1:1 equivalent of the UML representation; therefore the UML model is also the official documentation of the XSD schema. The UML model, stored in Enterprise Architect is available from here
This document is a complete listing of all the classes provided by GWML. GeoSciML, Observations and Measurements and Sampling Features, Metadata specific classes are not described in this document, and the reader should refer to specific documentation.
The GroundWater Markup Language Specification 1.0 is fully documented. The following page provide a complete documentation set for GWML.
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GWML is conformant to the following standards and best practices: