Hydroinformatics, understood as the application of advanced information technology to the problems of the aquatic environment, evolved through the 1980s, received its proper name in 1989 and was given a first published expression in 1991. Now already, in 1994, it has become one of the major sources of activity in all the principal technological service institutes that serve hydraulic engineering and water-management practice, as is recorded in the Special Edition of the Journal of Hydraulic Research of July 1994 that has been dedicated to introducing this subject.

Michael B. Abbott
Hydroinformatics ’94
First conference held in IHE Delft, The Netherlands, 1994

Hydroinformatics is the name of a w way of applying knowledge is utilized in the worlds of the waters. This new way of applying knowledge, which is developing generally within our present-day societies, is concerned with ways to access and employ electronically encapsulated information, which itself becomes knowledge just to the extent that is genuinely accessed and authentically employed. The knowledge of how to apply knowledge in the way is thus itself a certain kind of "metaknoweledge".
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Against the backdrop of the above developments, we currently discern two main lines of advance within hydroinformatics. The first of these is that data mining for knowledge discovery, which promises to revolutionize the way in which knowledge is produced, represented and applied. Data-mining-for- knowledge-discovery environments are composed of combinations of persons and tools with strong material overlaps that transforms raw data into representations of knowledge that are accessible to the end-users consumers of this knowledge.

The second main line of development is often nowadays fitted under the one rubric of knowledge management. As we use the term here, this covers all he ways in which given bodies of knowledge are prepared for consumption so as to be easily distributed and turned to various uses within society.
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We have already introduced the initial stage of this transformation as a transformation in the role of technologists, and increasingly of scientists also, from "knowers" to "consumers of knowledge". Now, however, we have to extend the range of persons involved in this process to include those who, although consumers of technology and scientific knowledge, are themselves neither technologists nor scientists, or at least they are not persons who are normally working professionally in the areas of concern here. We could then try to introduce this process as one of a democratization of knowledge, ...

Michael B. Abbott
Introducing to Hydroinformatics
Journal of Hydroinformatics, Volume 1, Number 1, July 1999.