HydroCube: a new entity-relationship hydrogeological data model

Managing, handling, and accessing hydrogeological information depend mainly on the applied hydrogeological data models, which differ between institutions and across countries. Growing interest in hydrogeological information diffusion, combined with a need for information availability, require the convergence of hydrogeological data models to make hydrogeological information accessible to multiple users such as universities, administrations, water suppliers, and research organisations. Furthermore, because hydrogeological studies are complex, they require a large variety of high-quality hydrogeological data with appropriate metadata in clearly designed and coherent structures. A need therefore exist to develop and implement hydrogeological data models that cover, as much as possible, the full hydrogeological domain. To respond to these requirements, a new data model, called HydroCube, has been developed for the Walloon Region in Belgium. The HydroCube model presents an innovative holistic “project-based” approach, which covers a full set of hydrogeological concepts and features, allowing for effective hydrogeological project management. This approach enables to store data about the project localisation, hydrogeological equipment, related observations and measurements. In particular, the model focuses on specialized hydrogeological field experiments, such as pumping and tracer tests. This logical data model uses entity-relationship diagrams and it has been implemented in the MS Access environment as the HydroCube database. It has been additionally enriched with a fully functional user-interface.