Groundstation.Water Team Makes the #WaterChallenge Finals!

Earlier this week, our Groundstation.Water team was announced as one of the three finalists in the SCOREwater project Water Challenge competition!

On April 19 the team will present its paper prototype to the jury. The winner of the Challenge will be selected that same day.

About the #WaterChallenge

What if you could prevent water pollution, so you can have a nice swim during a hot summer day? What if you could predict your house being flooded, so you can take measures to prevent this? Does this seem far-fetched? It is not. Most of the data to be able to do this is readily available, however most people are not aware and the data is sometimes difficult to understand.

This is the point where the challenge teams come in, answering the challenge main question:

Come up with ways to visualise the data of the SCOREwater project, plus enrich it with external data sources, to make it interesting and useful for citizens.

The SCOREwater project initiated the #WaterChallenge earlier this spring, inviting startups, university students, researchers, professionals, citizens and organisations to participate. Teams are asked to create a ‘paper prototype’ of their proposed data visualisation solution.

This paper prototype describes a data visualisation solution for one of the three cities that participate in the SCOREwater project: Amersfoort (Netherlands), Barcelona (Spain) and Göteborg (Sweden).

The Groundstation.Water team built its ‘paper prototype’ around the situation in the historic Dutch city of Amersfoort.

Human-Centred Approach for Amersfoort

The Groundstation.Water team proposes a solution they named W4A (Water4Amersfoort). The solution addresses public participation in water topics for the citizens of Amersfoort, in a multi-disciplinary way.

Research shows that raw scientific data does not engage users. Therefore, W4A enriches and visualises raw data with data that is deemed useful by citizens, like weather data. The solution focuses on policy choices that directly benefit (and therefore engage) the citizens of the city.

The solution engages users to participate in data collection, focused on helping policy makers make decisions that will directly benefit participating citizens and addressing the most pressing local issues. At the same time, the solution looks at the wider consequences of these decisions in a regional, national and European context.

The team will present its ‘paper prototype’ to the challenge jury on 19 April.

Please support our team in wishing them the best of luck! Follow us on LinkedIn to stay up to date on our results!

Check out everything about the #WaterChallenge on the SCOREwater Project website.

About SCOREwater

This challenge is connected to the EU-funded (Horizon 2020) research and innovation project SCOREwater. It focuses on enhancing the resilience of cities against climate change and urbanisation by enabling a water smart society.

The overarching vision is to link the physical and digital world for city water management solutions.

A lot of data has been gathered within this project and to make the most of all this data we set up this challenge. The project data contains for example: data on water quality at construction sites; soil moisture levels in the city; chemical composition of what is being flushed down the toilet. These data are useful for organisations and municipalities involved in the project, however it is still unreadable for the average citizen.

SCOREwater develops and tests three large-scale demonstration cases for collecting, computing and presenting various data tailored to the needs of our stakeholders

• In Barcelona we initiated the new domain “sewage sociology”, mining biomarkers of community-wide lifestyle habits from sewage.
• In Amersfoort we develop new water monitoring techniques and data-adaptive storm water treatment and apply these to water resource protection and legal compliance for construction projects. 
• In Göteborg we enhance resilience against flooding by sensing and hydrological modelling coupled to urban water engineering.

Through these three case studies SCOREwater will identify best practices for developing and using digital services, addressing water stakeholders beyond the project partners. The project will also develop technologies to increase public engagement in water management. Moreover, SCOREwater will deliver an innovation ecosystem driven by the financial savings in both maintenance and operation of water systems that are offered using the SCOREwater digital services, providing new business opportunities for water and ICT SMEs.

See the SCOREwater project website for all details.

The dotSpace Foundation is an expert in using Earth observation data for water challenges, as reflected in its participation in the Water-ForCE and Iliad Digital Twin of the Ocean projects

Featured image credit: VVV Amersfoort

Authors: Katya Rutkovskaya, Remco Timmermans