Fostering collaboration to better manage water resources

Good water management is literally vital for the and and semi-arid regions of the planet. Yet good water management requires multidisciplinary expertise, since one must consider climatic, hydrological, economical and social aspects to make balanced decisions on water usage. We here present SegHidro, a Grid portal designed to foster scientific, technical and operational collaboration to improve water resources management. The portal targets researchers and decision makers, enabling them to execute and couple their computational models in a workflow. The portal provides a framework which allows seamless integration of the models, meaning that each phase of the flow may be executed by a different expert and that the resulting data are shared among other portal users. Due to the nature of these applications and the need to execute many prospective scenarios, their execution requires high computing power. However, we go beyond providing high-performance computational Grid capabilities. We also enable people to complement each other's expertise in understanding the trade-offs in the water allocation decisions. The SegHidro portal is about sharing: human expertise, data and computing power. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.