Galdos’ INdicio^TM CRS Registry provides complementary technology to Blue Marble’s coordinate conversion products, allowing users to store and use their coordinate system data.  The INdicio^TM CRS Registry is the base technology currently being used by Shell Oil and the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers (OGP) in their Geodetic Parameter Registry, to provide an open standards-based registry of coordinate reference systems (CRS) and units of measure definitions.  Shell Oil is a customer of both Galdos Systems Inc. and Blue Marble Geographics.

“Galdos Systems is very happy to have Blue Marble Geographics as our exclusive representative for the CRS Registry in the Oil and Gas industry,” said Ron Lake, Galdos Chairman and CEO.  “It is a great combination of a leading client (Blue Marble Desktop) and a leading web service (Galdos INdicio^TM).  We look forward to a very successful partnership with Blue Marble.”

“Blue Marble is pleased to be working with Galdos.  Our expertise and experience in providing software and services such as the Galdos CRS Registry to address the challenges of securely and efficiently managing geodetic data make this relationship a great fit,” stated Blue Marble President Patrick Cunningham.  “Gone are the days of Access databases and flat file tools.  Companies that need secure, proprietary, efficient and scalable geodetic databases will find the coupling of the Geographic Calculator and Galdos CRS Registry to be an invaluable tool.”

For more information, visit www.galdosinc.com.

For media inquiries, please contact:
Richard Brown, VP, Sales, Galdos Systems Inc.
+1.604.484.2757 or rbrown@galdosinc.com

About Blue Marble Geographics:

Blue Marble Geographics of Gardiner, Maine is a leading developer and provider of geographic software products that provide sensible solutions for users and developers of geographic data.  Blue Marble has been writing GIS software tools and solutions for over 15 years and currently serves hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.  To learn more visit us at www.bluemarblegeo.com.

About Galdos Systems Inc.:

Founded in 1998, Galdos Systems Inc. (Galdos) delivers geospatial infrastructure software and services to businesses and governments.  Galdos revolutionized GIS technology and mobilized the worldwide Geo-Web by authoring the Geography Markup Language (GML).  Galdos is recognized as a world leader in the development of cost-effective systems for delivering GML and XML-based products for governments, government agencies and private companies.  For Galdos’ customers this means increased efficiencies in data sharing and significant cost reductions.  For more information on Galdos’ products and services, please visit www.galdosinc.com or for more information on the GeoWeb 2010 conference, please visit www.geowebconference.org.

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The Web - as in “World Wide Web” - is, of course, concerned with a global network of hyperlinked documents or, perhaps more properly, a collection of webs of documents since there is no guarantee that all the sub-webs are interconnected with one another.  This concept of the web has beenenormously successful, and has enabled not only a world of commerce, but also an every growing web of interactions among people through social media and social networking.  In this world of the web of documents, human beings play a dominant role, and the weak typing and semantics of hyperlinks is perhaps an annoyance, but not much more.  The people at the controls interpret the material returned in the link, and it is the person in the loop that makes it all work.

The SOA people (I am not arguing the merits of any architecture here, nor even what SOA means) do not, buy and large, come from the perspective of documents, but rather information processing and databases.  The notion of a hyperlink (especially as a URL), while not irrelevant, is not central to this point of view.  The primary issue is finding and then using an information processing resource.  Take, for example, a common case from commercial aviation.  An aircraft has just left an airport in Paris, bound for New York City, when a large snow storm forces the closure of the Kennedy Airport.  This event then requires that a new route be computed for the aircraft, and this must be done using information from the aircraft respecting its position, altitude, speed, weight, number of passengers, and remaining fuel, as well as the destinations and connecting flights of the passengers and crew.  One can see this requirement being handled by sending a message containing the required information to a route computation service, with the computed route with associated contextual information being returned to the aircraft.  Copies of the revised route are then also forwarded to the new airport destination, Kennedy Airport, other aircraft along the intended route, the airline (or airlines), and various components of the air traffic management system.  Nothing in this process especially suggests hyperlinking, but it does suggest messaging and response.

The airline problem above is, of course, greatly simplified, however, it implies the interaction between multiple systems, across multiple agencies, each doing specific data processing tasks (one may be scheduling the landings at the new destination airport, another displaying the current flights paths across the Atlantic), and each interconnected with one another.  This implies both implicit and explicit orchestration of these different processing components to accomplish a specific task; for example, a styling process might obtain the computed flight paths from multiple sources and generate a visualization (map) of the current flight traffic.  Many people think of this as System of Systems.  I think we might also refer to this as a Web of Systems.  In such a web, the interconnection between systems is based on messages and responses, and while each system may have an IP address, and the message might be communicated at base by HTTP, there may be no use of hyperlinking in the process at all.

So increasingly I would think of GeoWeb as meaning not only the web of documents, but equally, and I think ultimately more importantly, as a Web of Systems.  You may have heard me say that SDI should mean business process integration, and this is another way of saying the same thing.

None of this should imply that I think that hyperlinking has no role in the GeoWeb.  Far from it.  SVG, KML, and GML all make wide use of hyperlinking and, in some cases, hyperlinking is a completely natural aspect of system design.  Think of the display of flight paths.  Clicking on a path to obtain additional information, whether sourced locally or far away, makes perfect sense.  Nor should it be understood that I believe that REST architectures have no place in the GeoWeb.  Not at all.

What I am saying is that much of the GeoWeb is, and will be increasingly concerned with, the local and global integration of systems - with the GeoWeb as a web of systems - and REST architecture is not pre-ordained as the architecture to builds such a web.  As powerful as it has been in the web of documents, I believe there are serious issues with trying to build the web of systems in such a fashion.

Some of the issues revolve around the weak typing and weak semantics of a hyperlink.  In the web of documents this does not matter so much, since this is a world with a person in the loop.  Get the wrong document?  Check again.  Much tighter specification of type and semantics is required in the web of systems, or chaos may result.  Similarly, there are security concerns with the web of documents, and with the stateless connections that this generally implies.

Many of you will object, and say that the REST architecture can solve all of these problems, and this may well be.  I only assert that you must think of REST as it applies to a Web of Systems and not be stuck in the “past”, where Web mean only a web of documents.

SOA approaches, such as SOAP (or those based more directly on POST), have confused some people because they use the primary component of the Web of Documents, namely the HTTP server, as the fundamental message transport.  When they do this people, think “web server” and hence web of documents, when nothing of the sort is implied.  SOAP is not bound to a particular transport protocol, so it could just as easily run over socket connections (TCP/IP), or a messaging middleware such as JMS, as over HTTP.  Even the use of HTTP operations (POST, GET, PUT) are often “perverted” in a world more dominated by point to point messaging.  The ubiquity of HTTP servers is what has driven the use of HTTP below SOAP or other Web service encodings, and not any overt intention to make use of the web of documents and hyperlinked resources.

So GeoWeb = Web of Systems (and a web of documents).  Think about it!

Part of this blog post was published as ”Thinking of GeoWeb as a Web of Systems” in the “Building the GeoWeb” column in the January 2010 issue of GeoWorld Magazine.

Ron Lake and others respond to the questions: “Do you see any “silver linings” in the geotechnology industry’s economics that make you feel optimistic about the near future?”

Read Ron’s more detailed response to this and other questions.

In this edition of his ongoing column on Building the GeoWeb, Ron Lake talks about living in a period of constant, and accelerating, change. Ron proposes the use of “model-based thinking” as a tool for Grappling with Change and a way to better plan and forecast the needs of our urban environments.

The economic shocks of the past two years have shown how shallow was the foundation for such a belief.  Governments have come back with a considerable degree of energy, if not true leadership, and intervention is once again a popular concept.  I am, however, rather suspicious of the true motivation for this new level of government activity.  Is it borne of true concern for the public good, or is it rather that our political leaders have drunk the koolaid of the multi-national corporations and their interpretation of the globalizing economy?  My suspicion is that it may be more the latter than the former.

Why should we think that increased government is a good idea?  Why not let the new world order be played out by the multi-nationals?  Is not the market simply an extension of our democratic ideals?

To begin with, while we have indeed seen the rise of economies in China, India, Brazil, and Russia (and others), and that has certainly elevated the standard of living of tens if not hundreds of millions of people, it has also been done in a manner that cannot be sustained.   The coastal cities of China alone could consume most of the oil in the world if per capita car ownership were to match that of the United States.  If you go to China, you soon realize that gasoline, while expensive in local terms (China’s currency being artificially low), is not so expensive as to drive people to own small cars.  Everywhere new highways are being built, and the level of growth in car ownership is fairly breath taking.  Even with a very concerted push to electric vehicles and alternative primary power generation, the course on which China is now directed must inevitably meet the wall of climate change and energy insufficiency, with consequences for China and the entire world.  This is not to say that the Chinese have any less right than anyone else to move in such a direction.  The Chinese have just as much right to own two cars, or to take a 1,000 km vacation trip, as anyone in the West.  How then can we proceed?

It seems that we need to find a new way forward and in the not too distant future.  To find this way forward requires that we begin a discussion on a global level about equity.  I live in a country that has about 0.06% of the world’s population but has, depending on your measures, anywhere from 6% to 30% of the world’s fresh water.  While some might see this as no more than the foundation of a future economic bonanza, I think it is also unsustainable.

Without confronting the issue of global equity, a least in modest terms, how can we hope to avoid the darker potential futures of Fortress World or a World of Chaos, so well described in the Tellus Institute’s “Great Transition”?  Without confronting the issue of global equity, can we seriously deal with the problems of international terrorism, or the confrontation between the world of fundamentalist consumerism and the world of fundamentalist religion.  To hope to confront such issues we must find a route to a dialogue on global equity.

It is here that government must find its voice.  Centuries of experience have shown that unbridled capitalism, or corporatism, does not lead to improvement in the public good.  Corporations driven by profit, especially those driven by capital markets, have no motivation to engage in discussions of equity or the public good.  They are too busy making money.  Furthermore, they are not representatives of the citizenry in any way other than their buying habits.

This is not to say that corporations are evil or do not contribute to social welfare.  Many corporations do so, either out of fear of government regulation, or in an attempt to build a good image with their consumers, or from the enlightened actions of their management or employees.  It is not their role in society to engage in the discussions of equity, just as it was not the oil companies that sought to bail out the automotive industry in North America.

I think it is equally clear that governments, as we now know them, do not seem up to the task.  Too many years of being in the service of corporations and decades of “management” rather than “leadership” have provided us with neither the individuals nor the government infrastructure that is needed.  Why is it that our governments have not provided us with anything like a clear picture of what is happening in the world?

It is the institutions of government that must find the leadership and that must reform and revitalize our notion of what government means.  We must find leadership that is willing to discuss, in an open manner, issues of equity and issues of sovereignty, and which has the strength to forge a new world consensus and organization.  Some may see this as a form of global governance and this may indeed be what is required.  One can only hope that such a way forward can be found.

You may wonder what any of this has to do with the GeoWeb?  I think one of the objectives or motivations for a GeoWeb is a sort of global accounting system, not simply of money in the abstract sense, but something that provides visibility into what is happening in the world.  This is the function of any accounting system in a corporation.  It makes the actions of the corporation and its customers visible to the corporation’s management.  For our world, a much more sophisticated notion of “State” is required than money, and the presentation of that “state” and its distribution in the world is something to which the GeoWeb can make a significant contribution.  Such a system (or system of systems) can provide the information base for the discussion of equity and, ultimately, some of the key tools to enable this discussion to proceed.

Many of you will find these ideas fanciful and vague.  You would not think to board an airplane if you did not think it was supported by global tracking and management systems.  You like to believe that you are defended by sophisticated and far flung systems of satellites, aircraft, and other military systems.   You readily allow your governments to invest tens and hundreds of billions of dollars in such systems.  Yet we all are quite willing to move forward almost blindly in the real world which is infinitely more complex and without any security at all!

Read Ron Lake’s column in V1 Magazine - Digital Cities, SDI and the GeoWeb discussing the implications of moving towards Digital Cities.  Ron explores what a Digital City might be, the role of SDIs and the GeoWeb, and the impact of information technology on urban planning and environments.

Internet + Internet of Things = Wisdom of the Earth

The parallels between this statement of policy and the GeoWeb are striking.  The GeoWeb has been viewed from a vareity of perspectives, a few of these are:

1. As the integration of all business processes that deal with the physical world, i.e. that deal with our understanding of, and action in/on, the physical world.
2. As a Web of interconnected documents that describe the physical world.
3. As a Web of systems by which we control and manage our actions and interact with the physical world.
4. As a planetary accounting system that helps us all understand the “state of things” at the local, regional, and global level - whether that be the state of arctic polar bear habitat, or that of crowding in the city of Mumbai.
5. As a sort of Digital Nervous System for the planet that alerts us to changes in the state of our world.

While these specific visions were not outlined in Wen Jiabao’s speech, consider the following two examples from that speech.

Example 1: Intelligent Traffic Systems

Roughly translated:  A million cars idling for 10 minutes will consume some 140,000 litres of gasoline.  At the same time we have serious global problems with climate change and local problems with air pollution.  Why should this be the case?  The problem can be seen as one in which there is a lack of communication between the vehicles and the road. 

I interpret this to mean that the traffic systems should regulate the highways such that this condition does not take place, or takes place much less frequently.  One of the functions of Intelligent Traffic Systems would be to minimize the pollution generated by the use of the highway system.  Of course, he does not say how that might entail regulation of an individual’s actions but one can easily imagine the vehicle being told it cannot enter a particular section of the highway, or cannot even be taken out of the drive way.  What is key in Wen Jiabao’s remarks is that we can use technology to help us understand the consequences of individual actions, and the relationship between those actions and physical laws (”wisdom of the earth”).  We can choose to let a million vehicles idle on the highway, but in doing so we cannot avoid the consequences for air pollution, and for damage to our health and to the planet.  What an intelligent traffic system might do then, at the very least, is to make the linkage between actions and consequences visible to all of us, even if it does not yet constrain those actions.

Example 2: Human Perception - a jug of water - perception and inter-connectivity

Roughly translated:  We can associate two objects such as a person and a jug of water by placing one before the other.  This association, however, only has meaning as the person perceives some aspects of that jug of water, such as the water temperature, the amount of mineral content, or the presence of toxic or harmful substances.  It is these perceptions that give meaning to the association or connection between the person and the object.  This connection has then even greater meaning when this perception, this connection to the object, is shareable with others.

What this is saying is that we can use information technology to enhance our connection to things and to one another.  Sensors can measure the characteristics of things, and communicate those measurements to us, thus establishing a connection - a connection which is then shareable with others.

Generalizing from the jug of water, we can see sensing by objects on the Internet as a means of communication between humans and the physical world - to help us understand and connect to that world in a way not possible today.  One may even see in this a link to the idea of being in touch with the earth in an almost “spiritual” sense, such as might be found in aboriginal lore and teaching, but with the “being in touch” translated into what can be perceived.

These two examples, in my view,  strongly identify the “internet of things” with the GeoWeb.

Backwards compatibility is not simply a nice-to-have feature, but is essential to the whole process of open standards development and adoption.  The existence of open standards implies a coupling of the development activities of all those that support the standard, meaning software vendors, system integrators, end users, and the developers of dependent standards.  For such an enterprise to be successful, we must continuously support an implicit co-operation between all of these different actors, and without a significant measure of backwards compatibility this co-operation is in peril.  Software component and tool vendors will not be able to justify expenditures if they perceive specifications to be unstable, or if they constantly require more investment just to keep pace with a changing specification.  They need stability and a consistent growth path.  Without the components and tools, systems integrators cannot deliver cost effectively, and both they and their end user customers will suffer as a result.  The additional training costs of not meeting backwards compatibility objectives are, of course, then borne by everyone.

Modern open standards, with the exception of some fairly low level standards like IP (RFC XXX), do not stand alone.  Rather, they are parts of a larger web of standards.  The aviation information standard AIXM, for example, depends on GML in which it is written.  GML, in turn, depends on XML, XLink,  XML Schema, and a range of ISO standards (TC 211 19111, 19107, 19108, 19109, etc.), and these specification, in their turn, depend on many others from the ISO, W3C, and IETF.  Changing one standard in the web has implications for many others and, hence, for a potentially much larger community of software developers, vendors, integrators, end users, and standards developers.

Of course, one cannot expect that we will get it right the first time, and hence revisions of standards are an essential part of the process.  Furthermore, we will not encompass all of the needed scope the first time around either, and so the scope of many standards can be expected to grow over time as well.  We cannot be opposed on principle to revision for correction or revision for extension.

What we can expect, however, is that backwards compatibility be given a very high position in the list of criteria applied in the revision process.  We should almost never break compatibility unless we absolutely have to.  Sometimes, a specification which is “incorrect” is better left uncorrected, as difficult as that might be for some.  Sometimes the “simplification” of a standard may only lead to an overall increase in complexity in the marketplace.

I would strongly urge those working in the various standards bodies critical to the evolution of the GeoWeb (W3C, OGC, OAISIS, ISO TC/211) to take the criteria of backwards compatibility very seriously and to enact approaches and regulations that make it difficult to put forward a standard revision that breaks this compatibility.  Breaking backwards compatibility should be considered a significant act and considerable effort should be expended to prevent it.  Proponents of changes which break backwards compatibility should be required to show that this is essential and there is no alternative.  Furthermore, I believe that specification designers must seek, at all times, the means to make the transition from one revision to another as painless as possible.

The current belief in the OGC that a major revision of a specification (e.g. from GML 3.0 to GML 4.0) REQUIRES breaking backwards compatibility is a complete misunderstanding, and turns the whole process on its head.  As I understand it, what is actually intended is that, while on minor revisions backwards compatibility is a dominant objective, it CAN be relaxed (if necessary) when moving to a new major version.  This is NOT AT ALL the same thing as saying that a major revision breaks backwards compatibility.

The other issue in all of this is the pace of specification change.  Many people believe, I think incorrectly, that since technology changes rapidly, standards should as well.  I think, to some extent, that the opposite is true in the field of information technology.  Remember that, in information technology, we are building (at least in the core infrastructure) a permanent and evolving system.  There is only one Internet.  There is only one World Wide Web (of documents).  The Internet Protocol (IP4) has remained substantially unchanged since the 1970’s.  Rather than a whirly‑gig world of constant change, we can see ourselves as building a wall – layer by layer – with the hope and intent that the substantial essence of these layers will be around for a very long time.  As in the building of any permanent structure, care and patience is at least as valuable as speed and the issues of the moment.

Today, with the widespread use of web-based mapping, we are seeing this scenario being played out all over again. Web based maps offer poor capabilities for symbols, line styles, and area fills. Just try to make a dashed line in Google Earth or a train track symbol in Google’s My Maps.

It is very likely that these deficiencies will be overcome, and fairly soon. In fact, Galdos Systems has already proposed an extension to KML that would provide fancy line styles and area fills (see below). And, while I am in no way suggesting we go back to using paper or avoiding the powers of the web, there is a more important point that is perhaps being lost in this discussion of technology… and that is the function of maps for communication.

The main reason for creating a map in the first place is to visually communicate an idea, or to tell a story… “Here is how the armies of Persia faired in their attempt to conquer Greece”; “See the route taken by Xerxes’ fleet of Persian ships” “They had sailed along the coastline from northern Greece into the Gulf of Malia on the eastern Aegean Sea towards the mountains at Thermopylae.” How much easier this is to understand if displayed on a map. How much easier if the map uses communication techniques to get the message across. The pass at Thermopylae is very narrow and thus made a good point for the Spartans to mount their defenses. How much more readily this can be understood if we can walk through the pass and look up at the cliffs around us. A picture alone does not help as we do not have the context to understand where we are looking, and exactly what we are looking at.

Another way of saying this is that map making should be driven by requirements. I was recently in a country where they were making a base map. There was some discussion about the definition of a “building footprint” for their base map. Should this be an orthogonal projection of the building? Should it be the physical intersection of the building and the ground? I asked what I thought was the obvious question — “What is the function of the base map?” It was, I was told, the objective of the department to create a base map. Enough said.

Let’s return to the theme of maps as communication vehicles. A recent Google map on the spread of the H1N1 Flu virus was heavily criticized in some quarters because it was unable to clearly portray what was going on. When the “reader” zoomed out, there were too many symbols (balloons), and when zoomed in, the context was lost. Many people preferred artists’ renderings of maps (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8083179.stm as an example) to the Google map (see http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msa=0&msid=106484775090296685271.0004681a37b713f6b5950), although the Google map was possibly the more accurate and current. The reason was simply that the artist’s map did a better job of telling the story and communicating the message.

This brings us to two tried and true approaches to computer graphics and other kinds of visual presentation: the notion of separating presentation from content, and the model-view-controller paradigm that was first made well know by Xerox Parc. The two ideas are intimately related. The separation of presentation and content means, simply, that one can distinguish the essential facts and data about some event or region from any form of presentation about that event or region. I may know the location and geometry of a road, e.g. the path of the road centerline (this is the content), but not bind this a priori to a particular form of visual presentation. This means my information about the road’s geometry does not contain information about line weights or line symbology that might be used in a graphical display. In a more trivial example, content might just be text, while the presentation information, such as the type font, size, and colour, would be maintained separately. Why do this? Think again about the H1N1 Flu map. Both the artist’s map and the Google map would presumably rely on the same base information, namely the location, severity, etc., of the reported flu cases. This is the content. By separating this from the presentation of that content, we can then readily imagine various “styles” that interpret that content and hence present it in different ways. The difference then between the Google map and the artist’s map is not content, but the styling mechanism used to develop the presentation.

The model-view-controller (MVC) paradigm deals more with software design, but attacks the same fundamental issue. Suppose one is interested in the graphical display of, and interaction with, a building. MVC says to separate the model (and the maintenance of the model) of the building, from the views of the building, and to further separate both of these elements from software component called a controller for interacting with the building. Imagine the building as something very simple such as a rectilinear solid. This can be very simply represented as a rectilinear solid with a particular location and orientation. This is the building content. Through our controller we can change the elements of the model, i.e. move it to a different position, change its orientation, etc. The view enables us to look at the building model. We might present it in an orthographic projection or in some kind of perspective. This is the presentation. Again we are separating presentation from content.

Think of the importance of these simple ideas for collaboration. Suppose two (or more) groups of people interact with one another through a shared presentation (e.g. they share a screen image across the Internet) such as WebEx or NetMeeting. If one of them rotates the building, it will be some time before that operation is conveyed to all of the participants since the presentation (image) is quite large and needs to be computed and then transmitted to everyone. Contrast this with the use of an MVC approach in which only the model is shared and each participant’s software handles the view generation and provides a local controller. With such an approach, real time collaboration becomes very easy to accomplish.

The bottom line here is that, in our migration from the days of cartography (to understand this further look at the type of drawings and maps that appeared in Diderot’s Encyclopedie), we have forgotten much of the value of maps as communication tools. It is my belief that we are entering a new era of using maps (including navigable 3D maps) in which this idea can be enriched and taken to an entirely new level. We just have to think harder, and not lose the message in the medium (apologies to Marshall McLuhan).