Zhiyu Li, Daniel Ames, Jiri Kadlec,

Shawn Crawley, Rohit Khattar,

Alan Snow, Sarva Pulla
Brigham Young University
Contact: zhiyu.li@byu.edu

HydroShare

HydroShare
HydroShare is a NSF-funded partner project to CUAHSI HIS
and is being developed as a web-based data sharing system
for researchers to discover and access hydrologic data and
models. The HydroShare project intends to make sharing
of hydrologic data and models as easy as sharing videos
on YouTube or shopping on Amazon (Tarboton et al.
2014). An additional goal of HydroShare is to provide users
with cloud and/or distributed computing resources for data
and model analysis.

Tethys

Tool/App Res. Type

Raster Res.

Vector Res.
Time Series
Res.

Hydrologic data is different from regular textual data because

of its inherent geographic and temporal features. Rapid
visualization and spatial analysis can greatly assist users
in finding the exact resources they want. The Tethys
platform provides an effective and low-cost solution for data
analysis and visualization in HydroShare.

Tethys Apps

URL to App A

App A

URL to App B

App B

Retrieve/Push data

URL to App C

Need for Data Analysis/Visualization

Launch an app&
pass parameters

REST API

NetCDF Res.

HydroShare HISTimeSeries and Tethys Interaction Demo

Tethys Server
http://apps.hydroshare.org

Tethys Platform (Jones et al. 2014) is a web platform for the

development of hydrologic modeling that can lower the
barriers in model development.
Developers can use only one language, Python, to finish
almost all code work.
It synchronizes its components in a very loose coupling
design, making it very extensible.
Tethys and HydroShare are both based on Django
framework. Similar architecture means more possibilities
and less pain in deeper integration.

HydroShare classifies hydrologic data into different resource

types: generic, time series, HIS referenced time series,
NetCDF, raster, vector, model and etc. We added a new one
Tool/App resource type that executes the following steps:
Creates data analysis and visualization tools for each
resource type in form of Tethys apps.
Registers Tethys apps as Tool/App Resource Types in
HydroShare.
Lists all applicable tools on every resource landing page.
Launches a tool by a simple click, while passing basic
information to the Tethys server.
Tethys app then connects to HydroShare through the REST
API.

Uniform user account management: Users just need to

login once, either on HydroShare or Tethys, and can
navigate back and forth freely.
Develop modularized tools for each resource type: User
can then assemble them to create more custom tools or
light-weight models.
Support heavy-weight model developments: Such as
improving frequent mass data access efficiency.

App C

Why Tethys?

Integration Approach

Future Innovation

HydroShare Server
http://playground.hydroshare.org
(*)

References & Source Code

David Tarboton and et al., 2014. HydroShare: Advancing
Collaboration through Hydrologic Data and Model Sharing.
Proceedings of 7th iEMSs. San Diego, CA
Norm Jones and et al., 2014.Tethys: A Software Framework
for Web-Based Modeling and Decision Support
Applications. Proceedings of 7th iEMSs. San Diego, CA

Acknowledgements

HydroShare: https://github.com/hydroshare/hydroshare
Tethys Time Series Viewer:
https://github.com/zhiyuli/tethysapp-refts_viewer
Tethys Platform: https://github.com/CI-WATER/tethys

(*) http://playground.hydroshare.org is for demo purposes only. Data and user accounts will be removed regularly. For stable HydroShare service please refer to: http://www.hydroshare.org