From data management to decision support

Abstract

Water resources management requires potentially large volumes of data of different nature, ranging from long term historical time series to large-scale spatially distributed data and to real time monitoring and telemetry. The acquisition and processing of these data and turning them into useful information for policy and decision making pose a number of challenges. Information technology and, in particular, the rapid growth of the Internet promise new approaches and solutions that can help to transfer the data collected into decision relevant information, available to a large and diverse group of distributed stakeholders and actors in increasingly participatory decision making processes. Issues of distributed databases, access and ownership, institutional structures, data quality, timeliness, and costs, as well as the transfer of data to information that is directly relevant to water resources management decisions, are discussed. The role of data for modeling, and the role of models, GIS, and expert systems in decision support are analyzed. Using examples from Mexico (Lerma River) and Malaysia (Kelantan River), some possible solutions for integrated basin-wide water resources information and decision support systems are presented and illustrated with practical applications.