HydroLang Markup Language: community-driven web components for hydrological analyses

Abstract

We introduce HydroLang Markup Language (HL-ML), a programming interface that uses a markup language to perform environmental analyses using the hydrological and environmental framework HydroLang. The software acts as a self-contained interface that uses HTML tags powered by the web component specification to generate simple hydrological computations that enable data analysis, visualization, and manipulation via semantically driven instructions. It enables hydrological researchers and professionals to use markup language to retrieve, analyze, visualize, and map data with basic programming skills. The components' adaptability enables users to run analytical routines that perform simple and complex analyses on the client side. We present the implementation details of the approach, the use of custom elements in web technologies and academia, and share sample usages to demonstrate the simplicity of use of the human-readable and computer-executable framework.