River Basin Objects

• The main type, called RIVER BASIN OBJECTS, represent real world entities: such as (sub)catchments, reservoirs, cities, or treatment plants.

• Another type are SCENARIOS and they represent model oriented collections of instantiations of NETWORK OBJECTS that are partially derived from RIVER BASIN OBJECTS.
  SCENARIOS contain elements such as NODES and REACHES which are model-specific representations of River Basin Objects, that can inherit some of their properties from these real-world objects, at least as default values.

• AUXILIARIES are objects that are global or generic, and are not spatially referenced: examples are water technologies, crops and agricultural practices, pollutants, or animal and plant species.

• as a single point (observation station),
• as a reference point designating a larger object (lake, city),
• as a line or poly-line(river segment),
• as a rectangle (domain) circumscribing the object location, including one or several points or polygons (e.g., irrigation district, aquifer), or
• as a polygon ((sub) catchment.)

• they can obtain or update their current state (load, compute, infer, etc.) in a given context, referring to SOURCES (which may be other objects), through a set of METHODS;
• can report their current state or parts of their state to CLIENTS (the screen, to each other, to models, a hardcopy device, etc.).

For example, sub-catchment objects use the rainfall-runoff model RRM to obtain the runoff from the catchment under a set of landuse, internal water use, and meteorological conditions (the latter are obtained as time series from a climate stations object); this runoff, in turn, is used by the water resources model WRM as input for a start node (sub-catchment node). In the same way, demand nodes in WRM are linked to various river basin objects (settlement, industries, irrigation districts), and obtain their detailed behavior over time (eg., water demand, consumptive use coefficients, losses, etc.) from these objects.

Through the location of objects, the linkage to the GIS layers is established, so that spatial concepts (such as catchment, river reach, or the neighborhood of a point location) can be used for calculations (methods) by the objects.

The objects in WaterWare are grouped by CLASS.

  Object Classes   currently supported are:

short name	explanatory name/description	MODEL,NODE TYPE
RiverBasins	River Basins	entire scenario
Monitoring	Monitoring stations	ControlNode
Catchments	Sub-catchments, river basins	RRM, StartNode
Wells	Wells, wellfields	StartNode
Recharge	Wells, wellfields (recharge/injection)	EndNode
Desalination	Desalination plants	StartNode
Aquifers	Groundwater bodies, aquifers	AQUIFER
Pumps	Pumping stations (extraction or diversions)	DiversionNode
Structures	Weirs, sluices, gates, etc.	DiversionNode
Reservoirs	Reservoirs, multi-purpose (and Lakes)	ReservoirNode
Reaches	RiverReaches, canals, pipelines	REACH
Irrigation	Irrigation districts and areas	IWD, DemandNode
Farms	Agricultural farms, animal breeding	DemandNode
Settlements	Settlements, cities, municipalities	DemandNode
Industries	Industrial plants or areas	DemandNode
Tourism	Tourist resorts	DemandNode
Treatment	Wastewater treatment plants	TreatmentNode
Purification	Drinkingwater purification plants	TreatmentNode
Wetlands	Wetlands, marhses, bogs, lagoons	DemandNode
Nature	Parks, reserves, protected areas	Passive, Demand, Quality constraint
Scenery	Scenic sites, orientation points	--

Each of these classes may have any number of elements.

Each class has a set of specific attributes, organized in a set of data structures and associated METHODS for instantiation. Data structures include

1. HEADER with name and id (mandatory), location, and meta-data information, common to ALL object classes;

2. ATTRIBUTE SET that is class specific; they may include:
   • Tables of Descriptors, using XPS library functions for editing and inference;
   • Time series of scalars, vectors, or lists;
   • Matrices
   • References to related objects (children or sibblings);

Objects may be linked to other objects, for example, a treatment plant may lead on to a flow and a water quality observation station and its data, and objects have hypertext files that provide further explanation, meta data, and context.

Objects have methods available, which allow them to obtain some of their dynamic or derived properties in a specific context. Many object properties are static and can be stored in their respective data bases and files. Other object properties, such as the outflow from a sub-catchment or the monthly water requirements of an irrigation district, depend on numerous controlling variables or plans, decisions, and assumptions. Models such as the RRM rain-runoff model or the irrigation water demand estimation model can be triggered by the respective objects (i.e., sub-catchments, irrigation districts) to estimate such values as their attributes. They can in turn be fed to a subcatchment start node or an irrigation demand node in the river network, and provide input the corresponding simulation models.

The context for such an estimation is the default (reference) year and all observations and data pertaining to it. Alternatively, the context can be defined by a model specific scenario (including, for example, the selection of a specific year or period and its hydrometeorological characteristics), and, within this constraint, by a set of user specified assumptions.

The Object Data Base

In the data base module, a hierarchical class/element selector is displayed with a parallel basin map showing the element's location with unique class symbols. The selector shows:

1. Object class (display) name;
2. Description text (truncated, but can be shown in full in a separate pop-up window similar to the issues questionnaire !)
3. Number of elements
4. Class display symbol.

Selecting a class leads to a similar page with a selector for the elements of this class, which are also displayed selectively now on the parallel map window. The selector for the members of a class shows

1. Object name
2. Symbolic address
3. class-specific attributes summaries <== defined in the OBJECT CLASS TABLE.

Selecting any of the elements in the data base invokes a screen display derived from the class specific TEMPLATE for the respective class, consisting of HEADER and ATTRIBUTE information together with specific WIDGETS such as the MAP/location display, an embedded hypertext window (depending on the layout defined in the TEMPLATE, this may also be a button for a pop-up display of that hypertext information/imagery), and special data display WIDGETS for time series data, land use distribution pie chart, crop distribution pie chart, are-elevation graph, reservoir geometry, etc.

This screen display function has an EDIT button (only for ADMIN type users) that enables editing of attributes (descriptors or special structures with specific tools like area-elevation !) and provides save, delete, and copy functions similar to any scenario editing.