The development of integrated water resource information management system in arid regions

Water and land-use tension are growing with the growing population of the world especially in arid region. To develop an efficient, sustainable, and integrated water and land-use resource management policy, accurate and complex information about available resources and demand centers is required. Geographical information system (GIS) provides a means of representing the real world through integrated layers of constituent spatial information using overlaying and indexing operations. In Abu Dhabi, Water Resources Information System (AWRIS) was developed. AWRIS is a centralized, GIS-based, Web-enabled integrated information management system that allows storage and management of all water resource information. The system integrates a comprehensive set of tools and applications that facilitate the efficient management of the water resources of the Emirate. All historical water resource information from more than ten existing databases and 10,000 Excel workbooks have now been compiled, quality controlled, and migrated into the central database. AWRIS is built as an Integrated Information Management System and hence designed to improve productivity by linking all relevant applications for data handling to a centralized data repository and management system. This paper outlines the main features of AWRIS which are three-folds. First, it provides full support for the Arabic language. Second, it is the first of its kind in bringing unrestricted data types into a centralized information management system, and third, it provides a wide range of tools to effectively manage information on water resources.