Water Quality Portal/Use Cases

From Semantic Portal Wiki

Contents 1 Plain Language Description 1.1 Short Definition 1.2 Purpose 1.3 Describe a scenario of expected use 1.4 Definition of Success 2 Formal Use Case Description 2.1 Use Case Identification 2.2 Revision Information 2.3 Definition 2.4 Successful Outcomes 2.5 Failure Outcomes 3 General Diagrams 3.1 Schematic of Use case 4 Use Case Elaboration 4.1 Actors 4.2 Preconditions 4.3 Postconditions 4.4 Normal Flow (Process Model) 4.5 Alternative Flows 4.6 Special Functional Requirements 5 Diagrams 5.1 Use Case Diagram 5.2 System Sequence Diagram 6 Non-Functional Requirements 6.1 Performance 6.2 Reliability 6.3 Scalability 6.4 Usability 7 Selected Technology 7.1 Overall Technical Approach 7.2 Architecture 7.3 OWL 2 Encoding 7.3.1 Description 7.3.2 Benefits 7.3.3 Limitations 7.4 Java 7.4.1 Description 7.4.2 Benefits 7.4.3 Limitations 8 Resources 8.1 Data Services 8.2 Other Resources 9 References

Plain Language Description

Short Definition

Citizens in a community are interested in finding information about the quality of local water sources,
what companies are responsible for maintaining those sources, and whether companies have any violations 
of the EPA's clean water act or regulations put in place by a state agency. Due to living in a coastal 
zone, they are also interested in possible flooding that may cause runoff to bring pollutants into the 
local water sources.

Purpose

This use case exists to help citizens identify polluted water sources in their community in order to 
inform and organize clean-up efforts and regulation enforcement. Citizens with limited-to-no knowledge 
of water regulations should be able to use the portal to identify what sources are polluted and potential 
sources of the pollution.

Describe a scenario of expected use

A citizen (read non-specialist) wants to identify potential pollutants that could affect the reservoir 
from which her drinking water originates, including what tests her municipal water authority performs. 
She also wishes to include information about corporations located nearby the reservoir that have violated 
EPA regulations in the past 7 years and what pollutants were released into the environment as part of 
those violations. The system provides her with a summary of previously reported problems with the water 
source.

Definition of Success

A user should obtain a list of polluted water sources and any businesses that have violated the Clean Water Act.

Formal Use Case Description

Use Case Identification

Use Case Name: Citizen Monitoring of Water Quality

Revision Information

Prepared by:

1. Evan Patton
2. Jin Zheng
3. Theodora Kampelou
4. Ping Wang

of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on October 30th, 2010

Version 1.0.0

Definition

Successful Outcomes

1. The user obtains a correct list of polluted water sources and companies violating the Clean Water Act.
2. The user is aware of companies that could affect water sources in the event of a flood

Failure Outcomes

1. Sparse to no data from one or more governmental agencies leads to no data being available for the user to investigate.

General Diagrams

Schematic of Use case

Use Case Elaboration

Actors

• Primary actors
  • Citizen
  • Portal (as a mediator for other resources on behalf of the user)
• Secondary actors
  • Portal
  • USGS Water Quality Web Service
  • EPA Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO)
  • NWS Warning system

Preconditions

1. Knowledge of a user's Zipcode, city, state, county
2. Availability of existing data sources (USGS,EPA,NWS) for particular state/county

Postconditions

1. User identifies polluted water sources
2. User identifies businesses violating clean water regulations

Normal Flow (Process Model)

1. User (citizen) accesses Water Quality portal
2. User selects State and County
3. Portal submits query to USGS NWIS to obtain list of test sites
4. User selects reservoir test site
5. Portal queries ECHO for previous violations within the county
6. User identifies measurements taken from test site to possible violators
7. User adds annotations about the link
8. Portal provides summary of additional reports about this water site.

Alternative Flows

Error conditions that may be reached:

1. Citizen accesses Water Quality portal
2. Citizen selects State and County to obtain a list of water testing sites
3. Reservoir providing water to citizen has not been tested, so does not appear in USGS database
4. Citizen unable to continue (error condition).

Alternate flow started by NWS alert system:

1. NWS predicts heavy floods in region
2. Portal alerts users
3. User identifies nearby pollution sites that may be within the flood area
4. User annotates the pollution sites with flood reference for further investigation

Special Functional Requirements

None

Diagrams

Use Case Diagram

System Sequence Diagram

Non-Functional Requirements

Performance

• The portal should be able to return results within 30 seconds on average.
• It is allowable that the first access to the portal might be slower while the system collects data from different resources.

Reliability

None

Scalability

• The portal should scale with the number of counties with data available.

Usability

• The portal should be easy to use. Anyone who can read/write should be able to interact with the system and understand, at a minimum, what water sources are polluted or not and what companies are violating EPA regulations.

Selected Technology

Overall Technical Approach

Architecture

Provide a central portal system that uses an OWL2 reasoner combined with ontological descriptions of regulations. The portal will source information from different governmental organizations, which combined with state regulation data provided by the portal, will make it easier for users to identify polluted water in their communities.

OWL 2 Encoding

Description

The Web Ontology Language provides an RDF encoding for description logics. This allows for tools called reasoners to inference over data using logical structure of the data rather than having to implement custom algorithms for each particular problem.

Benefits

Allows for datatype restrictions, making it possible to classify based on threshold limitations. Querying will then return the appropriate results without any additional manipulations.

Limitations

Could potentially be NP-complete when a more optimized algorithm could be constructed. However, that algorithm would be less flexible/extensible in the long term.

Java

Description

A programming language that runs in a virtual machine, making it easily portable to different systems.

Benefits

Portability. Pellet, an OWL 2 reasoner, is written in Java as is the Jena Semantic Web framework. Therefore, it will be easy to interface with these existing tools as we develop the portal.

Limitations

As the application scales artificial memory limitations placed on the machine will eventually cause failure.

Resources

Data Services

Data	Type	Characteristics	Description	Owner	Source System
National Water Information System (NWIS)	Web Service	Varied, specific conditions included in data	Contains information about testing sites for water quality and quantitative measurements of various characteristics of water	USGS	Water-Quality Web Service (http://qwwebservices.usgs.gov/)
Enforcement & Compliance History Online (ECHO)	Web Service	All data provided in HTML-encoded tables	Identifies violations/violators of EPA regulations, such as the Clean Water Act	EPA	ECHO (http://www.epa-echo.gov/echo/)
ZIP Code decoder	Web Service		Provides additional information about ZIP codes, such as the state, county, and city represented by a particular code	Geonames	http://geonames.org

Other Resources

Resource	Owner	Description	Availability	Source System
RI Water Quality Regulations	RI Department of Environmental Management	Provides limits on pollutants in waters within the State of Rhode Island	PDF Format	[1]

References

USGS Water Quality Survey

EPA ECHO

National Weather Service

Rhode Island Water Quality Regulations