Water Health Open knoWledge

 The WHOW (Water Health Open knoWledge) project aims to foster the creation of the first European knowledge graph on water consumption and quality, health parameters and dissemination of diseases to be reused for advanced analysis and development of innovative services.The project leverages the use of the Open Linked Data paradigm. Water related datasets from European countries and Copernicus (the European Union’s Earth observation programme) will be integrated and made available for re-use on the European Data Portal. Health related datasets from Italy will be identified and correlated to specific water datasets.WHOW is targeting use cases in the creation of the knowledge graph, identifying and integrating the relevant set of indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and has embraced a co-creation programme where interested stakeholders and users have been engaged from the initial phases of the project.The initiative supports the European Public Open Data Digital Service Infrastructure by helping to boost the development of information products and services based on the re-use and combination of environmental data and health data on disease dissemination.In Europe, legislative measures aim to protect water and its ecosystems, to guarantee sustainable water usage and to reduce risks for human and living beings using a cross-domain approach covering physical, biological, chemical parameters of single water bodies and of the surrounding environment.Wider availability and higher quality of data on water pollution, water consumption, biodiversity, health parameters can help in better assessing the issues at stake and foster the development of innovative services, allowing decision makers and communities to make more informed decisions on policies and lifestyles.Europe is still struggling in providing a holistic view on these topics with data fully harmonized in terms of semantics, formats and licences. Even at the national level, datasets from different administrative levels show a fragmented context.WHOW is addressing these issues by creating of a framework of data, data models and supporting services to provide a consistent view on water and health data to be effectively re-used to foster economic growth and better decision-making.The framework will be a powerful tool for promoting transparency and attract experts in these areas that will actively participate in the co-creation of the WHOW framework. It should serve as reference model also for re-use outside of Europe.