This document discusses the Digital Delta initiative in the Netherlands to address environmental challenges through digital innovation. The current Dutch water management system is complex, interconnected, and facing pressure from climate change. The Digital Delta aims to optimize the system by facilitating data and service reuse across more than 100 existing initiatives, which could save 30-60% of annual budgets spent on duplicate efforts. The key principles are to prove business impact, enable reuse of data and services, maintain data ownership with original owners, focus on service availability over applications, and avoid vendor lock-in. The Digital Delta will create a catalog and standards to connect data sources and applications through web services in a simple way.

1. DIGITAL
DELTA
Environmental challenges &
climate change opportunities
Antwerp march 24-25 2015
Raymond Feron
Programme director

3. 3
1953The Netherlands

4. 4
Delta Works 1.0
• Brick & Mortar
• Binary
• Single Purpose
1953

5. Watersystem
Very well
managed
Under climate change
pressure
Complex
Interconnected with
other functions

6.  Flood safety
 Fresh water availability
 More crop per drop
 Logistics (Harbor Rotterdam
supplies 75% of Western
Europe within 2 days)
 Ecology
 Energy efficiency
 Adaptive
 Affordable
Optimizaton needed

7. >100
initiatives
Dutch Water
Management
annual cost: € 7
billion
30-60% of budgets spend on:
• Finding data
• Getting Access
• Validating quality
• Duplication of IT tools
Current situation

8. While saving costs and driving innovation
From To

9. 1. Prove the business impact, in all its aspects
2. Facilitae re-use of both data & services: develop
once, use many times
3. Data ownership and quality control
remains with the original Data owner
4. Focus on availability of services
instead of traditional developement
of applications
5. No vendor lock in/out
Keep it simple
Design principles

10. Digital Delta
Data sources:
web services &
linked open data
applications:
web services
Digital Delta connectivity:
1. A catalogue for existing data & software
2. Standardisation (semantic & technical)
to enable re-use
www.digitaledelta.nl

13. DD: impact

14. To conclude
data
services

16. thank you
Raymond Feron
Programma directeur Digitale Delta
raymond.feron@rws.nl
+31651450634