It has been a year since Pope Benedict XVI offered the chance for Anglicans to join the Catholic Church. This offer has enticed some Anglo-Catholics, both inside and outside of the Anglican Communion, to request membership in the Anglican Ordinariates.
Technology is not unlike fashion. What was once considered hip and trendy falls out of fashion, only to returned in a retro-improved way after a period of time. I never realized this until I hosted a group of Dutch Waterboards at the ESRI Headquarters in Redlands, CA…
Seeing some of my former clients after some 5 years was a pleasant distraction from the day-to-day business of projects and product development. It provided an opportunity to recollect some of the work we did on creating a common data model for water boards in the Netherlands ten years ago and look at how the goals of that project were doing: share application development to reduce redundant investment, less dependency on a particular application vendor, bridge the information gap between organizational units and business processes, and others.
Although the data model has changed name, its contents are still very much alive. Over the years, the Waterboards have developed several client-server applications that connect to a single data store, thus integrating the various business processes within a Waterboard. All organizational units have the same definition and information for the objects they manage, including but not limited to waterways, hydraulic structures, permits, and numerous other aspects of water management. This would lead you to think: mission accomplished!
But the group of visitors expressed new desires that have come up in this past period that have lead to their study trip to the United States: further separate the layers of the application architecture or the use of new features in supporting software components, to name a few. Over time the client-server pattern has been followed by thin-client and other application architectures. More recently service oriented architectures and the enterprise services bus (or is it services-buzz?) are in-vogue. The accepted styles for user interfaces have changed with those technologies as well. Not that the current application wasn’t meeting the initial needs, but the needs have changed with the advent of new technologies and capabilities: how did we ever do without AJAX?
People trade in their cellphones, not because the old one is broken, but because the new ones have more cool features, and the availability of those features creates the need for them. This is the old supply-demand principle of a market economy.
This principle also applies to software technologies as well. Where a couple years ago the use of HTTP GET/POST protocols for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) services specifications was well accepted, there now is a growing need to add support for SOAP/WSDL to these specifications. Not because HTTP GET/POST doesn’t work, but because the context in which the OGC services are being used is changing to use Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) that require the use of specific standards such as SOAP. Note that the data or the data model that is made accessible through these changing protocols is not affected by the particular choice of protocol.
Well, ever noticed what happens if you use SOAP (most noticable in the shower)? It dissolves and you have to buy new soap! New technologies will come for messaging, information exchange, presentation, aggregation, central versus distributed data management, and what not. Acknowledging this is half the victory of the technology battle: do what makes sense for the foreseeable future, follow the general trends of IT, and assess what and when new technology fits your business needs.
For the Dutch Waterboards, the constact factor in this 10 year period has been the data model, confirming one of the assumptions that lead to the definition of the data model to begin with. The tremendous effort that was put in analysing entity-relationship-diagrams, class-diagrams, data dictionaries, and other exciting materials, proved its value in a world of ever changing technologies.
Appeared in GeoInformatics Magazine (www.geoinformatics.com) in October 2006
With the laptop, the problem of the traveling salesman has found a new dimension. Perhaps it is even time to discuss whether the original criteria of a solution to the traveling salesman problem require reconsideration.
I’m sitting in Terminal 6 at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, waiting for the flight back to California. For a while now, there is this gentleman looking at me and clearly something is bothering him. When I hear my boarding call and I unplug my laptop from the power outlet, he straightens his back and I sense a definite mood swing. Walking to the gate I turn around to double check that I took all my belongings and I see the man plugging in his laptop and settling in the seat I just occupied. He now overlooks the surrounding area as a king overlooking the area around his castle. Nothing can hurt him anymore.
In my trips to clients across the United States I have learned the locations of power outlets and phone jackets at different airports. Keep your eyes out for flocks of laptops scattered around pillars or phone booths. These are the signs that power or Internet connectivity is not far away.
Since time salesmen have tried to determine how they can plan their visit to the clients of the day. The essence of the traveling salesman problem is basically improving efficiency. In the past travel meant waiting for the transportation vehicle to arrive (horse carriage, train, airplane) or to get at the next stop.
Nowadays we have mobile offices and wireless Internet connectivity. So instead of looking at the pattern of the lights in the ceiling or the color of the carpet in the airline terminals, we can now spend our time preparing for a meeting, work through the list of e-mails that piled up during a meeting, or write columns for a GIS magazine.
There are some limitations to the mobile office though. One of those is battery power. The salesman of today has to bridge the flying time between airports and the time spent at an airport between two connecting flights. This translates into a basic GIS problem: select a route from A to B as a set of flying segments for which the flying time per segment is not more than available battery lifetime and for which the battery can be charged in the time spent between two segments. Account for loss of battery power due to shutdown and startup when the airplane takes of or lands.
Note that shortest distance is no longer one of the traveling salesman’s problems. A longer flight might result in more effective working time and may therefore be considered a more optimal solution.
Extending efficiency to 100% leads to an interesting situation. At one point, the battery cannot be charged enough to last the next flying segment, resulting in making the segments shorter. This however also results in more shutdowns and startups, which has a negative effect on the remaining battery lifespan. Thus segments get shorter and shorter. The traveling salesman gets stuck halfway to his destination… Traveling further is not sensible since it is more efficient to stay at the current location.
A solution to this paradox may come in time as technology progresses. Video conferencing or even virtual reality meetings will become possible in the future, finally solving the traveling salesman for once and for all: the salesman stays at the office! Until then sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.
Appeared in GeoInformatics Magazine (www.geoinformatics.com) in April/May 2003
