Why Hilltop?
Water quality science
Monitor water quality in the environment.
- Data collection: Manage your water sampling schedules and collect water quality measurements. Capture extra detail from data collected in the field to provide all the proper context. Submit your water samples to the lab for analysis and automatically import lab results for further analysis.
- Verify your data: Use graphs to look at the data to find correlations between measurements or spot trends.
- Model your data: Add modelling scripts to transform your original data and present it as a new ‘virtual’ measurement. Repack data into daily statistics or convert discrete water sample measurements to a continuous loading using flow correlated from a neighbouring catchment.
- Statistics: Use statistics to look at trends. Compute percentiles and produce a table or graph. Compute distributions for each year and see the data as box whisker plots.
- Linked Measurements: Correlate rainfall and flow to water quality data from different sites. Do statistics on the linked measurement during export to interpolate flow at the time of the water sample or compute the average flow for a given interval before and after the sample.
- Depth Profiles: Create depth profiles where measurements such as pH, water temperature or dissolved oxygen are measured at various depths. Draw graphs across the depth range and over time and see how the measurement changes.
Hydrological science
Study water movement and its effects.
- Rainfall: Capture raw rainfall data, then total the rainfall over any specified interval. Show totals computed at a fixed interval in graphs or tables. Use moving totals for high-intensity rainfall to see totals not aligned to the start of the day or some part of the day.
- Event Analysis: Use Linear-Moments to calculate the coefficients of a distribution and avoid problems with fitting a curve using regression techniques. Reconstruct missing floods below a given threshold flow.
- Low Flow: Calculate the return period of a drought to compare one year with others. Build a rating curve to transform flow to return period and graph it. Apply two rating transformations sequentially, a stage-to-flow transformation, then a flow-to-return period rating. Use envelope plots to show flow during a drought against the daily statistics of the complete record.
- Rating Curves: Generate a rating from a gauging and adjust the curve as you like. Use ratings as a general-purpose transformation like continuous calibration of air quality instruments to account for drift over time. Calculate a new curve after each calibration and smooth across the interval between calibrations.
- Streamflow Gaugings: Enter gaugings by hand or import data from instruments like the SonTek FlowTracker, Teledyne RDI StreamPro in section-by-section mode, and the Scottech Glogger. Use velocities at a depth and offset, and let Hilltop calculate flow or read the results from Acoustic Doppler instruments like the SonTek River Surveyor and WinRiver. Write the 15-item gauging results into Hilltop and store important information in the facecard. Let Hilltop calculate the error from the gauging using ISO 748 or read it directly from the instrument.
- Cross Sections and Reaches: Use cross-sections surveyed across the same line to see sections over location and time. Group cross-sections into a reach for volume calculations at a given time or volume changes over time. View the change of volume over time for beach profiles. Use graphs to show how sand in a dune moves because of wind and tides. Handle partial surveys by dynamically reconstructing the rest of the section using previous surveys and use this process to estimate the shape of the section between surveys.
Quality assurance
Enhance data quality through traceability.
- Quality Codes: Attach quality markers to data stored in Hilltop. You can add quality codes that follow the National Quality Code Standards or your office practice and draw graphs using the appropriate colours. Assign a quality code to rating pairs and use this when drawing graphs of flow. View reports to see the distribution of quality over time to show how the data quality is improving.
- Uncertainty: Stores uncertainty as part of the quality series using absolute or relative uncertainties, for example, ±3mm for stage and 8% for flow. You can make absolute and relative uncertainties in the time series. Graph the data and show the outer bounds. The uncertainty calculation for flow takes account of both the uncertainty for stage and the uncertainty in the rating curve.
- Transactions and Audit Trail: Record and retrieve operations on your data using transactions. Use commands to reverse out the last transaction. You can create an audit trail to store comments about the changes made to the data. The audit trail can capture the user, site, measurement, and time range of the added, edited, deleted, or copied data to get insights into who changed the data, when, and why. You can attach comments to the data to provide more context.
- Document Store: Store documents and catalogue them against the site, data source and timestamp. Attach multiple document types like imported CSV files, site photographs, working files, and calibration certificates. Documents can be stored in Hilltop’s database or your company's document management system. Access and open documents directly from a graph for immediate context.
- Asset Tracking: Track assets such as instruments and loggers and their location or movement. Define out-of-service locations such as your van, the office or repair centres, so you know how many instruments are ready for use or under repair. Calculate the asset's book value and produce reports to show assets that can be replaced. Store calibration requirements for an instrument and let Hilltop warn you of instruments that need removal from the field for calibration. Once calibrated, you can put the calibration certificate into the Hilltop document store and display it on request.
Data exchange
Collect, monitor and share your data.
- Receive and publish your data via API: Receive and publish data and statistics through a web service API supporting multiple formats and standards. Provide metadata so users can find out what sites are available and draw a map or what measurements and data are available for a site.
- Telemetry: Our telemetry products help you read data from remote data loggers or data available over the internet from FTP sites and web services, useful for collecting data from third-party service providers.
- Import: Import different CSV formats using rules for the data in each column. Define translation rules to translate between an external system and your sites and measurement. Import data from instruments, external systems and other file formats and run your imports on a schedule.
- Export: Export data and statistics to CSV format, XML, clipboard, and more. Use filters on the data, the quality markers, or the metadata to control what data you’re exporting.
- Forms: Use Hilltop forms or import data from ESRI Survey123 mobile app form submissions to add data from site inspections. Design your own forms and determine how the data is stored, like entering check data on-site and making it available as input to a ramp correction.
- Data transfer: Use native Hilltop XML to send data from one organisation to another. Write directly into a zip file for sharing and open zip files directly in Hilltop. Use translations to identify the sender and translate their sites and measurements into your own.
- Connect to other systems: Read from many commercial SCADA, telemetry and archiving systems, including internet services, TimeStudio, Hydsys, Tideda, OSI PI, HydroTel, KISTERS Query Services, CUAHSI WaterOneFlow, Magpie, PC208W, Citect, Datran, Intellution Fix, DHI dsf0 files, other Hilltop servers and a lot more. Connect to data from any relational database by adding tables that describe the structure of the data. Hilltop connects to various data systems directly, avoiding a data import step, and behaves like it reads data from Hilltop itself.
- Federated data views: Make your own selections to federate data from multiple systems or sources into one view. Combine data from servers around New Zealand and run analysis on them together.
- Monitoring: Monitor incoming data for data out of range or late. Send emails to one or more recipients and let them know there is a problem. You control the content of the email, including substitutions to let you insert the relevant data into your emails. Attach files to the message like a graph of the data. Combine sites and measurements into a collection so service providers get one email with a list of all the water meters that haven’t sent data.
Enhance your workflows
Maps
Use maps for a spatial view of your data. ESRI shape files can be displayed as map layers, and selecting points will generate data graphs.
Collections
Working with groups of sites and measurements is made easy by treating them as a collection. This way, you can produce reports for sites in a catchment without repeatedly running the same command across multiple sites. You can build any number of collections and use projects to categorise a group of collections.
By using collections, you can control the view of the data and see only the data you are interested in or control other people's views. You can build a collection for serving across the web and control access to data.
Scripting and app development
Hilltop offers a range of scripting libraries that can be accessed through COM, .NET, Python and R. These libraries are designed to fetch catalogue information, data, and statistics. They can be used to develop web and enterprise applications based on environmental data or utilised in your data science work and environmental data reporting.
Supported data types
- Simple Time Series
- Data Entry Forms
- Hydrometric Gaugings
- Hydrometric Sections
- Gauging Results
- Reduced Level Gaugings
- Reduced Level Offset Sections
- Long Sections
- Hydrometric Facecards
- Reduced Level Facecards
- Long Facecards
- Rainfall
- Meter Readings
- Wind Direction
- Water Quality
- Depth Profiles
- Air Quality
- Taxa Counts
- Digital
- Value and Location