Environment Water
Open Water Rate Specification (OWRS)
by California Data Collaborative
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.
Assessment
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Open License Yes
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Transferable to Other Jurisdictions Yes
OWRS is a general structure that supports many different types of water rates (e.g. tiered versus budget-based) with no regionally specific attributes
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Stakeholder Participation Yes
The CaDC is made up of stakeholders from California utilities sector
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Consensus-Based Governance Yes
Contributions can be made to the OWRS and other CaDC project on their GitHub page
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Extensions Yes
Extensions only permissible in the metadata, where agency information is located. Rate structure is inclusive but non-extensible
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Human Readable Yes
YAML structure is even easier to parse than regular markup languages or JSON
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Machine Readable Yes
YAML key-value pair structure
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Requires Up-To-Date / Real-Time Data Yes
effective date is a required element for a bill, and municipalities will release the rate bills at regular intervals
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Metadata Yes
Metadata includes fields such as agency or utility name, date, and bill frequency