uWATER-PA: Ubiquitous WebGIS Analysis Toolkit for Extensive Resources—Pumping Assessment

Introduction According to the National Research Council (2010), a significant challenge in the GISciences is the creation and development of tools that enable the results of scientific modeling to be easily understood. For science-informed decision making as well as for the purposes of informing and engaging ordinary citizens in discussions regarding geographical technologies, the National Research Council (2010) argues that it is indispensible to develop tools that can easily present scientific modeling results and translate scientific understanding into the process of decision making. Yang and Lin (2011) at the Illinois State Water Survey (ISWS) address this challenge in the context of assessing the effect of pumping on changes of groundwater levels (i.e., drawdown) of a confined aquifer by making freely available the GIS-based software uWATER-PA to calculate drawdown based on the Theis equation (Theis 1935). The model was developed using the Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 programming language and implemented as an extension (add-in) to ArcGIS Explorer Desktop (AGX), a free GIS by ESRI Inc. Compared to ESRI’s flagship product ArcGIS, AGX has a simplified user interface (UI) and reduced functionality. The uWATER-PA software is built on top of the uWATER framework previously developed by the ISWS (Yang and Lin 2010). The purpose of the uWATER framework is to extend AGX by enabling the execution of both spatial and attribute query functions, which are common in a more advanced GIS (e.g., ArcGIS),