Blue Water: A Common Platform to Put Water Quality Data in India to Productive Use by Integrating Historical and Real-time Sensing Data

Water is unique in its role as a life preserver. It is important to all members of a society. However, if one is looking for quality data in India to make data-driven decisions, one is lost. This is surprising given that there is a rich history of data collection in the country and looks forward to adopting real-time water sensing in a big way. In this paper, we first explore issues around data management practices for water that have prevented their widespread dissemination and then, in response, propose a general data access and reuse framework which focuses on usage of water information for a purpose like irrigation, drinking or industrial need.We illustrate our approach through a prototype accessible as a mobile app and from a web site. This framework titled as ’Blue Water’ would serve as a common data integration platform for historical as well as real-time sensing data, and for the latter, we also present details for development of a realtime Non-Stationery Water Quality Sensing Tool.