Australian water utility provides open access to water and wastewater network location data

Open data has become a goal for many governments, but is relatively rare among utility and telecom network operators and owners.  In Australia several water and wastewater network operators have made the location of their underground networks open and publicly available.  I had a chance to chat with Charles Moscato, Spatial Information Officer at Yarra Valley Water (YVW) about  their implementation of an open data portal which allows planners, designers, contractors and others to access and download raw geospatial data showing the location of YVW's underground facilities.

Background

Open data has been gathering momentum among governments.  An important impetus was the United States Federal Government where data has been in the public domain since 1909. The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California state and counties, and by municipal governments.  In 2013 G8 leaders (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union) signed a charter on open data.  The Ordnance Survey in the UK began releasing some of its data with open licensing as part of its OpenData initiative in 2010, but it wasn't until 2018 that the OS Mastermap was made openly available for the public and businesses to use.There is even an open data site showing underground natural gas flow and gathering lines in Colorado.

But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. In the U.S. Data.gov was launched in late 2009.  In 2013, President Obama issued an Executive Order making open and machine readable the new default for federal government information in the United States.  At the municipal level North Shore City, NZ and Vancouver, Canada have been in the forefront of municipal open data.  By 2008 North Shore City had made its water, waste water and storm water network infrastructure publicly available on the web.  Vancouver's open data portal was initiated in September 2009.

A major motivation for open data has been government transparency.  But there is also evidence that open geospatial data contributes to the economy.  In 2008  Australia and later New Zealand commissioned studies of the contribution of spatial data to the national economy that have concluded that with appropriate government policies (such as open geospatial data) the contribution to the GDP, estimated to be on the order of 1%, could be doubled.

Open access to utility network location data

In Australia 12 local governments and water utilities have made the location of their water network open to the public.  The City of Gold Coast was the first in 2014. 

Yarra Valley Water serves over 30% of Victoria's population with water and wastewater services including 764,000 residential and 57,000 business customers. Historically the groups who needed access to the location information about Yarra Valley Water's underground network were (1) planners, surveyors, designers and other utilities who needed to plan around, build near or to connect to water and wastewater assets and (2) excavators and construction contractors who needed to avoid damaging underground utilities during excavation.

The process used by Yarra Valley Water to extract and provide this data was arduous, time consuming and slow.  20-30 request were processed per week requiring one full time person.  The turnaround time was typically about 10 days.

Business case for open data

In addition to a broad initiative at all levels of government to improve government transparency by making government data open, specific business benefits were identified.  The first objective was to make the process of providing accurate location and other data to designers and contractors more efficient freeing up one FTE for more valuable tasks.  Secondly automating the process would improve internal workflows for capturing, updating and publishing data.  Thirdly, replacing slow paper-based processes for data visualization in the field.  Another benefit, whose importance for improving data quality cannot be overestimated, is the ability for users of the data to report discrepancies. Another benefit is the avoidance of potential litigation when data was found to be incorrect.  From a business risk perspective an on-line system simply made access more efficient to data that was already publicly available via the Dial-before-you-dig (DBYD) service.

Data quality

In the mid 80’s to early 90’s the location of underground water and wastewater assets was digitized from paper drawings at various scales.  In Metropolitan Melbourne wastewater assets at 1 : 500 and water at 1 : 1000. In rural Melbourne both wastewater and water were captured at 1:25,000.  Attribute information was manually keyed in which was an error prone process.  The challenge was to find a way to convey to users the reliability of the data.

In 2018 Yarra Valley Water implemented the Australian quality standard AS 5488 - 2013 which provides users with a measure of the quality of location data enabling them to assess risk.  The AS 5488 quality levels are quite different from the U.S. ASCE 38-02 quality standard and the U.K. PAS 128 standard. The AS 5488 -2013 Quality Levels specify an absolute or relative accuracy.

1. Absolute subsurface feature location ±50 mm horizontally and vertically

2. Relative subsurface feature location ±300 mm horizontally and ±500 mm vertically

3. Relative spatial interpretation of position ±300 mm horizontally with indicative depths

4. Unverified and approximate position, roughly ±1 to 10 metres horizontally

About 75 % of Yarra Valley Water asset data was assessed a “D” Data Quality Level, this is either older data (2000s and earlier) or data with no association to a field survey.  After the 2000s the quality of asset location data is assessed at Quality Level C.  Typically this involves a site inspection to determine the location of visible above ground features and inferring the location of connecting pipes.

Open online access to network location information

In 2016 Yarra Valley Water decided to implement an on-line web application that contains up-to-date locations of current and proposed sewer, water and non-drinking water infrastructure in one easy-to-use map.  The site is updated daily with the latest available information and is open to all Australians.  The site was inexpensive to implement because the technology to do this has been around for a long time and was already used internally within Yarra Valley Water. The site provides a web map allowing users to browse the data.  Implementing this site freed up one FTE that had been dedicated to responding to requests for information.

But the most important feature is that once a user finds an area of interest, they can download raw geospatial vector data using the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) standard.  This capability allows users to extract data when they need it, whether for planning, design or construction. This capability has appealed to designers, in particular, because it allows them to integrate the data into their CAD or BIM design tool. The significant benefits that result from knowing the location of underground utilities prior to design are well known.

Currently field staff and customers can report errors, but this process is currently arduous and the capability is used infrequently.  There is an initiative underway to replace this with a very simple way to report data errors such as incorrect location, wrong material, or inaccurate pipe diameter.  In the future it may be possible for vetted customers to make corrections to the data directly.

This is an example of the direct business benefits of open data for network operators and to the wider construction community.  It illustrates that implementing an open web portal is inexpensive and can have immediate tangible business benefits.  But perhaps more importantly it provides significant benefits for a number of use cases including utility damage during construction, emergency response, and an essential part of smart cities.

Comments

[Andrew Bashfield]

Congratulations on a great article Geoff and Charles. Nice to see an Australian water authority recognised as a leader in the open data movement.