Sharing Your Flooding Data Externally

As the number of potential users of flooding information continues to increase, so does the time spent in managing access to an organisations datasets.

Increasingly, there are demands for detailed access to information from outside the organisation which complicates the process given the massive dataset sizes and their innate technical complexity.

Traditionally, sharing flooding data outside of your organisation involved screenshots, emails, hard drives, static GIS layers and extents, with huge uploads and downloads, and considerable time.

Even as a waterRIDE user, whilst the Pack n’ Go tool works well, it still needs to collect a copy of your datasets prior to sending (often by post or upload/download).

There is also the issue of what the end users are doing with your information (and the format in which this best suits them), as well as maintaining control over its currency which is lost once the information goes “out the door”.

For example, a consultant looking to develop a flood model on behalf of a developer would be looking for detailed information that would be quite different to what an insurer wishing to revise flood insurance premiums for a community would be after.

Fortunately, the newly released waterRIDE CLOUD module was built with data sharing in mind. Being Cloud based (although it can be installed in local, on-premise mode), information is always ready to share.

Access to information could be managed and facilitated using a combination of approaches, including:
- Time limited user logins
- Different waterRIDE projects for different types of end-users (eg limited vs detailed)
- Limiting access to information – “view only” access through to the ability to download   specific portions
- Metadata stamps to ensure data currency
- Data access logs

The benefit of this approach is that a flexible means of distributing controlled access to datasets can be readily established, greatly reducing the effort in responding to data requests, potentially enhancing the level of service, and providing a tighter layer of Quality Assurance.