California’s State Water Resources Control Board is working to make data more available and usable.
Making the data more usable internally helps “get data between our silos,” Water Resources Engineer David Altare said at the spring meeting of CalData, a group of state employees interested in networking and best practices for data use.
“We’re going all the way through the life cycle," Altare said. "How do we collect data in the right format? Enable the data flow? How do we think about our systems to store the data so it's accessible? And how do we manage and share the data — what platforms and mechanisms?”
Altare’s group is piloting best practices for staff to avoid “spurious correlations” and to focus in on how visualizations can help guide programs.
Altare said the board is concerned with whether this is “the right data, the right granularity of data,” and whether it is stored in a way where the data is easily readable, retrievable and usable.
The board is working to build tools and applications to use with the data, so data literacy is increased internally and externally, that includes using tools like Tuva to train users.
Since the data being collected is inside a government agency, the data group built scripts, hosted on code-sharing site GitHub, to help retrieve the data and make it usable to non-data scientists.
So far, the board is harnessing the data to improve tracking of water quality and of garbage around water sources.
