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==Vision of Dropedia==
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In the region of the Lower Jordan River constantly decreasing natural freshwater resources are a big challenge. Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) considers social, economical and ecological objectives when deciding over long-term strategies in a study area. IWRM is collaborative and knowledge intensive, but missing operational guidelines and data management challenges hinder decision makers and scientists to make the decision process transparent and research results comparable.
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Dropedia describes the IWRM domain in an ontology and motivates scientists from Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Germany to share research data and to model the water resources domain.
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==History of Dropedia==
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Dropedia was developed within the [http://www.iwrm-smart2.org/ SMART] research project supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The project has the goal of developing a transferable approach for Integrated Water Resources Management in the water shortage region of the Lower Jordan Valley. The research partners are from Germany, Israel, Jordan and Palestine. The project started with phase I from 2006-2010 and elaborated work in phase II from 2010-2013.
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Main design and development work was
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by David Riepl in his PhD thesis on "Knowledge-Based Decision Support for Integrated Water Resources Management with an application for Wadi Shueib, Jordan" [http://www.ksp.kit.edu/9783731500117].
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==Typical pages on the wiki==
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The three main pages of Dropedia are:
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* [http://dropedia.iwrm-smart2.org/index.php/Water_System_Knowledge_Browser Water System Knowledge Browser] to explore the knowledge base by visiting catchments, water resources, demand sites and many other aspects of the water system in the Lower Jordan Valley.
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* [http://dropedia.iwrm-smart2.org/index.php/IWRM_Process_Builder IWRM Process Builder] to find interesting use cases of applied IWRM studies in the Lower Jordan Valley, both on regional and local scales.
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* [http://dropedia.iwrm-smart2.org/index.php/SMART_-_Innovative_technologies_and_concepts SMART - Innovative technologies and concepts] to get informed about the activities of the SMART project for sustainable management of available resources with innovative technologies.
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==The community of Dropedia==
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Dropedia is intended to support researchers from Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Germany to collaborate. For that, the wiki also provides a [http://dropedia.iwrm-smart2.org/index.php/Dropedia_Glossary glossary] of important IWRM and SMART terms and a [http://dropedia.iwrm-smart2.org/index.php/References collection of information resources] used throughout IWRM and SMART.
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Since mainly intended as a collaboration platform for the SMART project, Dropedia is write-open only for members and partners of SMART.
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However, fostering transparency in research and development, Dropedia is read-open to the general public and explicitly targets the entire community of stakeholders in water resources management.
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Aligning with the wiki philosophy, any user with write-access to Dropedia is able to contribute to any pages in Dropedia.
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Since the project run out at the beginning of 2014, usage has nearly come to a halt. Dropedia remains a useful reference of water-related information and may be continued by a project continuing the important work initiated by SMART in the region and 2) works as a blueprint for scientific projects in arbitrary domains.
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==Why is SMW used?==
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SMW is mainly used for storing and querying of structured information about the IWRM domain, e.g., about streams, reservoirs/lakes, springs, wells, municipalities, and agricultural/industrial/touristic demand sites.
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As an example, Dropedia contains comprehensive information about the geology, hydrogeology, climate, land use, and water resources of [http://dropedia.iwrm-smart2.org/index.php/Wadi_Shueib Wadi Shueib], an eastern side wadi of the Jordan Valley near the capital Amman.
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Also, Dropedia contains an [http://dropedia.iwrm-smart2.org/index.php/Wadi_Shueib_IWRM_Analysis IWRM analysis of Wadi Shueib] to decide between different possible strategies of water resources management in the region.
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==Other interesting MediaWiki extensions used==
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* Semantic Internal Objects are used to store numeric values about regions, e.g., climate values for [http://dropedia.iwrm-smart2.org/index.php/Comparison_of_areal_rainfall_interpolations_and_literature_values_for_Wadi_Shueib_area Comparison of areal rainfall interpolations and literature values for Wadi Shueib area]. Such values would then be queried from other pages.
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* [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Spark Spark] would be used to query a SMART project-wide triple store with climate data from a sensor database.
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* Confirm user accounts and ConfirmEdit would be used to allow partners to register and get confirmed, at the same time hindering spam.
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* Widgets would allow to embed small analysis applications.
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* Rich Media Extension is used for file management.
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* The usual suspects: Semantic Maps, Semantic Result Formats,
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==Lessons learned with using SMW==
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The usage of forms could not be avoided since researchers would not learn the wiki syntax. SMW showed sufficient flexible for administrators to implement all required functionality. Yet, the strong focus on forms let Dropedia evolve more to a content management system than a collaborative wiki.
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An initial working hypothesis stated that Semantic Web ontologies allow semi-automated IWRM analysis. Although we were able to represent and share measurements of environmental indicators using the RDF Data Cube Vocabulary, estimating indicators still requires mostly manual effort, e.g., copy-paste from publications and spread-sheet processing in Excel. A more automatic computation of indicators will require to formalise relationships between (collections of) measurements.
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==Further reading==
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* [http://www.aifb.kit
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edu/web/Inproceedings3415/en SMART Research using Linked Data - Sharing Research Data for Integrated Water Resources Management in the Lower Jordan Valley]