All the actors of the water domain in France organized on a common protocol since
1993, have adopted in 2005 common rules to improve the access to water data. The
application of these rules will progressively lead to a more efficient data
dissemination process. One example is the geoportal of the Sandre
http://sandre.eaufrance.fr/.
Since 1993, a community on the water domain in France has been organizing the access
to water data. Covering marine water, groundwater and surface water, all partners
have agreed on a common protocol. One of the main goal is to achieve to communicate
between partners using a common language for water named "Sandre". First design on a
common semantic (codification, data models, dictionnaries, ...), the Water
Information System for France has extended this interoperability to technical issues
(protocols, webservices, ...). In 2005 was published the guideline for the Water
Information System for France architecture taking into account all on-going
initiatives at EU level like WISE or INSPIRE and at international level like OGC,
W3C, OASIS, ... 

On this step by step approach, progress to access to the data on a distributed way
will be improved based on existing system, adoption of a SOA, promoting use of
opensource software, delivering free public access to water data in France in a
consistent way.
 
Following 2 years of prototyping and analysis of systems, different projects are
implementing these rules today. One example is the geoportal for water data of the
Sandre. This webmapping application is using Mapserver/Cartoweb and only webservices
to display, query and export data to provide access to water data references (river
network, monitoring stations, infrastructures, ...). The interface use WMS and WFS
services to connect to the data publish by producers. The long term objectivs is to
avoid the manual data collection process.