Hydroseek is an ontology-aided search engine for finding scientific data on water quality and hydrology from approximately 1.9 million sites in the USA. Hydroseek creates a unified view over databases of agencies such us US Geological Survey, Environmental Protection Agency, Texas Commission of Environmental Quality, Chesapeake Information Management System, National Atmospheric Deposition Program, Long Term Ecological Research Network and individual researchers removing the semantic, syntactic and information system heterogeneity barriers to improve the search experience and reduce time spent on data discovery and preparation prior to processing. Depending on the method of interaction (GUI or web services) and the function invoked output can be provided using CUAHSI WaterML¹, GML Features² or Microsoft Excel.

System uses Microsoft Virtual Earth³ map interface with OWL⁴ ontologies providing the knowledge base used in supplying the auto-complete keywords and classifying of search results.

Hydroseek follows Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) and most functionalities are available via SOAP⁵ webservices. System also supports queries using NASA's Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) keywords via webservices.

Hydroseek is designed and developed by Bora Beran at Drexel University. Software packages or webservices used in Hydroseek and other contributions are as follows; Virtual Earth map interface by Microsoft, JENA API by Hewlett-Packard, IKVM. NET by Jeroen Frijters, NWIS and CUAHSI WATERS Testbed webservices by David Valentine (SDSC), TCEQ metadata catalog contributed by David Maidment, Tyler Jantzen (UTX-Austin), EPA webservices developed by Bora Beran/David Valentine, CIMS webservices developed by Yoori Choi/Bora Beran, CIMS catalog contributed by Michael Piasecki, Yoori Choi (Drexel University).

1. http://www.cuahsi.org/waterML/1.0/
2. Excerpt from GML Application Schema used
3. http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/
4. Web Ontology Language (OWL)
5. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)