OWRS is a machine-readable format for specifying and sharing water rate information. OWRS is designed for analysts, economists, and software developers interested in analyzing water rates. OWRS attempts to fully encode a water utility's rate structure and pricing schedules in a form that is easy to store, share, modify and apply programmatically.
- License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
- About the Publisher: The California Data Collaborative or CaDC is a voluntary, collaborative project where local cities, water retailers and land planning agencies have come together to build new data infrastructure to ensure California has reliable water today and into the future. The CaDC has pioneered a new 501c3 data infrastructure non-profit and provides analytical tools and dashboards that are developed using freely available open source tools.
- Updated by Publisher: 2017-03-04
- Level of Use: All examples shown by CaDC are within California
- Open License: Yes
- Transferable to other Jurisdictions: OWRS is a general structure that supports many different types of water rates (e.g. tiered versus budget-based) with no regionally specific attributes
- Stakeholder Participation: The CaDC is made up of stakeholders from California utilities sector
- Consensus-based Governance: Contributions can be made to the OWRS and other CaDC project on their GitHub page
- Extensions: Extensions only permissible in the metadata, where agency information is located. Rate structure is inclusive but non-extensible
- Machine Readable: YAML key-value pair structure
- Human Readable: YAML structure is even easier to parse than regular markup languages or JSON
- Requires Real-Time Data: effective date is a required element for a bill, and municipalities will release the rate bills at regular intervals
- Metadata: Metadata includes fields such as agency or utility name, date, and bill frequency
Added to directory: 2017-06-14