To coincide with tomorrow's International Open Data Day, a cloud-based, open web platform that collects and shares water and environmental data, from across geographical and watershed boundaries, has launched its beta web version and project profile video.

The Water and Environmental Hub (WEHUB) features a water data catalogue and an application programming interface (API), which enables water-based, customized applications for computer tablets or smartphones to be easily developed.

The project is led by the University of Lethbridge, with financial and technical support from Cybera, Tesera Systems, the Alberta WaterPortal, and the University of Calgary Biogeoscience Institute.

Robin Winsor, President and CEO of Cybera, sees the WEHUB project as an example of the benefits that open source projects can provide to communities. "It also demonstrates the ground-breaking cyberinfrastructure technologies developed in Alberta by companies such as Cybera, which can aid large-scale cloud projects to share a vast amount of data with researchers and society at large," says Winsor.

The open web platform was developed to be an online source of data, and will help academia, government, industry, non-governmental organizations, and the general public, to find, use, share and enhance water and environmental data. In addition to providing information uploaded by organizations and individual users, the WEHUB actively seeks out and aggregates open data from across the Web. Water and environmental data that previously would have required extensive searching across many different websites can now be found in one place, saving users significant time and resources.

"The WEHUB is one of the largest sources on the web for North American water and environmental data, and this video and beta version of the web portal will help users understand how extensive and accessible it is," says Alex Joseph, Executive Director of the WEHUB project. "We expect the WEHUB to become the go-to site for anyone searching for geospatial data related to water or the environment."

The WEHUB also offers a real-time data collection service and output tool (API) that allows companies, software developers, and other users to develop customized water applications for computer tablets or smartphones. Users can also embed water and environmental data into their organizational processes using the WEHUB web platform.

"We want businesses to become aware of the potential for WEHUB to provide commercial opportunities in analyzing and manipulating this data," says Dr. Dan Weeks, Vice-President, Research at the University of Lethbridge. "Applications, such as home water-saving tools, or systems that display river or lake water levels and temperatures, can be built on the data that this web platform provides."

View the WEHUB beta website : http://waterenvironmentalhub.ca/