Workflow Provenance Metadata to Enhance Reuse of South America Drainage Datasets

South America is vulnerable to various natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and landslides. Such events must be prevented or at least managed, by public institutions through the provisioning of proper and accurate environmental information and tools. The paper presents an Open Data approach to enhance the release of South America drainage datasets in order to be quickly exploitable by both governmental Institution and private organization coping with such emergencies. The Open Data paradigm is followed to respond to the e-Government requirement for a transparent, stable and standard information source to be sharable and reusable across sectors and disciplines. The paper contribution is to enhance drainage datasets exploitation through provenance information of the data processing workflow enabling trust, and allowing data reproducibility. It presents a practice to describe entities and processes involved in producing drainage networks derived from a DEM. Metadata of workflow provenance is provided according to the W3C PROV data model. Moreover, the paper provides information about datasets publication as Open Data as well as information about their access.

I. Introduction

The number of recent natural geophysical, biological and hydro meteorological disasters in Latin America is alarming: the catastrophes affected almost a hundred and forty million people and caused more than two hundred and sixty thousand casualties [1] . In South America, hundreds of millions of people live in natural disaster risk areas. One of these is Minas Gerais, the most known Brazilian mining region. The mining activity is the main forms of environmental degradation, affecting the surface and groundwater, which is used for public supply and are the source of heavy metal contamination, including mercury and arsenic [2] . The collapse of mine tailings may cause ecological and human disasters of great dimension. For example, on 5 November 2015 one of the worst mining accidents in the history of Brazil happened. A tailings dam in the Samarco Mine collapsed releasing more than 30 million cubic meters of water and mine waste. It caused the flooding of small villages and the mud spill devastated the ecosystem of the Doce River killing innumerable fish and threatened the human water supply severely affecting local communities of fishermen and farmers [3] .