About CalSWIM

CalSWIM is an ongoing project with the goal of facilitating open, coordinated, integrated, and informed decisions for those interested in water resources. With initial focus on California, CalSWIM provides a framework for engaging water management professionals, scientists, and the general public in the process of sharing information about water resources, therefore benefiting from critical open supervision of the content, and from valuable volunteer contributions that cannot occur in a closed infrastructure. The current work aims at creating a public and easily updatable information infrastructure of "all things watershed" that includes all watersheds in California.

For contributors. In CalSWIM you can: create your own pages with watershed information, add and correct certain pages created by others, add events, upload documents (images, Word and PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, etc.), make your publicly accessible relational database available to others, view data available in the linked databases, create tables and charts with data from linked databases, create maps with data from linked databases, and much more! More...

Attribution and access control. Given that this wiki relates to data that is often the basis for important strategic water management policies, it takes attribution and access control very seriously. Unlike Wikipedia, where all pages can be edited by everyone, even anonymous web surfers, CalSWIM requires a registration to anyone wanting to contribute. From then on, all actions made by contributors are attributed to those contributors, so everyone can see who did what. Also, while all pages can be viewed by everyone, some pages can only be edited by specific users. More...

Historical Context

The CalSWIM project started in 2004 under the supervision of UCI professors Crista Lopes and Stanley Grant, and from a contract with the Orange County Stormwater Program. Like so many other scientific cyberinfrastructures, the CalSWIM web site started as a closed infrastructure, i.e. its update has been controlled by a small number of individuals, and any changes to it required the intervention of web-knowledgeable professionals. This model does not scale to the ambition of the CalSWIM project. In order to make this cyberinfrastructure sustainable, expandable, outreaching, and continually up-to-date, starting in 2007 we transformed CalSWIM into an Open Collaborative Information Repository, in the form of a wiki with advanced content management features, including databases, maps, and other forms of digital data.

Open information infrastructures such as the one we are developing are sometimes met with skepticism from their users. The chaotic nature of Wikipedia (one the most visible collaborative information repositories) is not appropriate for open cyberinfrastructures supporting collaboration over scientific and regulatory information. The CalSWIM wiki takes issues of trust and credibility into consideration in its design. Trust is a complex concept based on personal and social factors, that includes assurances about data security, knowledge about data provenance, knowledge about authors' reputations, and assurances about author attribution (citations and quotations) in uncontrolled contexts.

Current Support

Part of the CalSWIM Wiki project is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Contact

For any matters pertaining to this wiki, please contact Prof. Crista Lopes (lopes at uci dot edu).

Credits

• UCI Faculty
  • Prof. Stan Grant, Department of Chemical Engineering and Material Sciences
  • Prof. Crista Videira Lopes, Department of Informatics
• UCI Students
  • Yasser Ganjisaffar
  • Sushil Krishna Bajracharya
  • Barry Doyle
  • Amir Haghighat
  • Abhishek Pednekar
• UC staff
  • Darren Haver
• OCGOV supervisor
  • Chris Crompton
• OCGOV staff
  • Amanda Carr
  • Carmen Oancea
• OCGOV consultant
  • Brock Bernstein
• Tetra Tech staff
  • Steve Parker
  • Patti Sexton
• The National Science Foundation
  • Office of Cyberinfrastructure