Nowadays, the water sector is modernizing into a more open, transparent and consolidated value chain that involves all relevant stakeholders (water industries, water authorities, scientific community and also, citizens). Based on this concept, the water sector is seeking to reduce the internal and external fragmentation caused by the adoption and usage of restricted standards (vendor lock-in).
This fragmentation is being remarkable within the adoption of newer innovations in the sector in terms of newer decision-making tools (water resource planning, optimization of the distribution, policy & governance recommendations, citizen behavioural analysis, leakage detection, etc), newer monitoring and control methods (for sludge management, chlorine monitoring, etc) and newer sensing methodologies (introduction of UV-Vis sensors, passive methods, etc). Hence, all of these innovations are still focused on the different water value chains without considering the effects in others ones or even highly their implications in the nexus (drinking water, sewage management, etc).
The cross-synergies and interlinked decision making between different value chains could provide newer digital services and enhanced decision making. The integration of the water sector internally and with the nexus is being performed through the use of open standards and semantic interoperability mechanisms. On the one hand, open standards permits to make broader digital services to easily be transferred and replicable through different environments. On the other hand, semantic interoperability mechanisms permit to create different data spaces, linking the information between domains and therefore, to permit understanding of their provenance, context and implications in the interrelated domains.
As a conclusion, NAIADES project presents vital innovations in the adoption of open standards and interoperability mechanisms through the demonstration of FIWARE compatible tools to build on top of them newer digital water services. Moreover, NAIADES envisions generating data value for distribution, optimization of the operations in the infrastructure and improvement of social acceptance and awareness of newer digital solutions. Transversally, NAIADES is generating valuable semantically enriched water data sets to be part of future data-spaces of information about the water sector. Therefore, NAIADES brings the water sector the future towards the adoption of newer and intelligent digital solutions that permit the water sector to paradigm shift to digitalization.
written by Aitor Corchero (Eurecat Technology Centre)
Figure 1. Digital Innovations in water value chains (source: https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/news/ict4water-action-plan-implementation-report-now-available )