Kurzweil paints a future for humanity in which we transition from a biological to a non-biological species, with the transition point only 20 to 50 years into the future.  He forsees us escaping our biological limitations through pervasive use of nano-technology and a deep understanding, even a reverse engineering, of the workings of the human brain.

While the pace of technological development has indeed been breathtaking, one should also be aware that there are other changes in the world that may eclipse our release from our biological bodies.  In addition, the nature of technological growth, while it has been very rapid, may also be subject to constraints similar to the biological systems that appear in many of Kurzweil’s analogies.

Let us start with the issue of other changes in the world that may push the Kurzweil singularity into the distant future.  The most obvious such issue is climate change; however, this might be considered a symptom as much as a cause, and other problems such as overpopulation, habitat destruction, pollution, shrinking biodiversity, and overcrowding might also be examined.  The issue of species extinction is a case in point.

Many biologists believe that we are on the edge of another of the great extinction events in the history of living things on planet earth, comparable to the event that brought an end to the dinosaurs some 65 milion years ago.  There is huge body of information on this subject, and it is clear that species are indeed disappearing at an alarming rate – an exponential rate even.  The graph developed by Edmund Wilson et al illustrates this.

Exponential change is not constrained to technological change.  If we look at the composition of these extinctions we see that they are largely composed of microscopic organisms many of whose function is unknown or only partially known.  At the other end of the scale are the large mammals. 90% of the Lion population in Africa was estimated to have disappeared in the twenty years leading up to 2003.  The situation has not improved in the past decade, with some predicting the complete disappearance of lions from countries such as Kenya in only 10-20 years.

Much of the problems for other species has been the gains in affluence and the growth in the human population, resulting in rapid rises in energy production.  In fact, many claim that there is a fairly direct correlation between our gains in affluence, and consequent rise in energy consumption, and the disappearance of the creatures around us.

One particular analogy that Kurzweil uses to explain the idea of exponential growth is, perhaps tellingly, the spread of pond scum on the surface of a pond.  The area of the pond covered by the scum doubles each day.  At some point, the pond is 30% covered.  The observer , not understanding the pace of exponential growth, thinks there is a good deal of time before the pond is completely covered, and is alarmed to discover that it is completely covered only two days later.

To Kurzweil this analogy simply illustrates that most people do not appreciate the implications of exponential growth which, for him, is the essence of technological change. Equally, however, we might think in terms of ecological decline!  There are not so many years before we discover which is the reality.  The Singularity, one way or the other, is near indeed.

As I have commented a number of times in this column, we have established an international economic system which does not factor in the use of environmental capital (such as the consumption of resources or the disposal of wastes) as a cost.  All of us are thus able to dump waste products into our soils, water, and air without paying the cost of doing so, other than the direct costs of the actual dumping.  The costs-in terms of health impacts, contribution to global warming and climate change, and the reduction in water and soil quality-do not enter into the economic equation.  If we are ever to achieve a sustainable economy, meaning one that can continue, we are going to have to reverse this situation and factor these costs into our economy.

The impact of resource consumption and waste disposal is typically not felt in the present.  If we add carbon and other pollutants to the atmosphere today, the implications in terms of additional health care costs and other aspects of environmental degradation, will be felt years and even decades hence.  We could think of this in terms of system dynamics and say that we have a plant with a very slow response time; unfortunately, however, our model of the economy ignores this plant dynamic altogether.

If we consider this in the context of our helicopter simulator, we can think of our unsustainable economy like the helicopter without the modified dynamics.  If I move the stick forward, the helicopter responds immediately, and I have the illusion of a free and easy motion.  But, if I train on this helicopter and then transfer to a large commercial aircraft, the differences in dynamical behavior will be striking; if I were to act and react as if I am still flying the helicopter, disaster is only a matter of time.

Now, suppose that I add the modified plant dynamics for a large plane in the simulator.  The helicopter now behaves like the large plane, and I can transfer my learning from the simulator to the real aircraft.  Suppose we could do the same with our economy.  Suppose that the economy had a built-in simulator that reflected the dynamics of real world processes, so that as I moved the levers and controls of economic activity, I felt the feedback of the natural world?  Could we train ourselves to act differently and start building a sustainable economy?

Regulation of the commons has proceeded through a variety of international treaties and organizations (such as the World Meteorological Organization, the International Maritime Organization, the International Hydrographic Organization, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), various bi-lateral agreements on cross boundary air pollution, and so forth.  These organizations and conventions have created a complex set of treaties that have contributed to a reduction in ship emissions (e.g. MARPOL), and provided a loose framework for international co-operation on issues like sea bed mining and the management of fisheries.

One of the consequences of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was to create so called Exclusive Economic Zones, which declared that coastal states had exclusive jurisdiction over coastal resources (e.g. fish, oil, gas, minerals) and the responsibility for environmental management within 200 nautical miles of their coastline.  I am not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, but it would seem that this convention focused more on aspects of development than it did on aspects of environmental preservation.  The consequences of this agreement are that the vast majority of all readily exploitable resources in the ocean fall outside the global commons – that is, they lie within the control of one nation state or another.  Each nation state might thus be content to monitor and regulate its own Economic Zone and forget about the state of the global commons.  At the same time, the impact of these Economic Zones on the global state of the oceans and the atmosphere is unchanged.

I believe it is time to start thinking in terms of a global monitoring system for the atmosphere and the oceans.  We have the beginnings of such a system in things like:

• Project Argo,
• air pollution mapping (see Carbon Dioxide Emissions, Mercury Emissions, Ammonia Emissions),
• global climate change mapping (see Early Warning Signs, Desertification),
• and the early beginnings of interactive sites (query/response) for climate change (see Climate map shows world after 4C rise, Climate change interactive map).

While some of these are promising starts, there is, overall, an obvious lack of standards (projections, scales, symbology) and a severe shortage of money.  None of these sites, or any of the other sites that I looked at, could provide anything like an effective interface for exploration and understanding of the current state of the global commons.  Many sites also tend to focus on public relations without the traceability to support that what they are depicting is credible.  A summarized map of “hot zones” is interesting, of course, and does seek to communicate important ideas and issues – but ultimately we must be able to see that there is a relatively unbroken chain between such presentations and the measurements and analysis on which these presentations are based.

A global monitoring system is thus a very, very complex entity and is deserving of a project on the scale of the race to the moon.  A few years back (just over a decade now), the U.S. NASA had a refocus of its mission to that of Mission to Planet Earth.  I had hoped that this would become the primary, or even the ONLY, mission of this organization, and one that could galvanize similar efforts around the globe.  This did not happen.  Furthermore, even the original program was focused more on the technology of measurement hardware and spacecraft than it was on the objective.  Hopefully, some nation or group of nations can find the will to again embark on such an enterprise and leave Mars to the Martians.

With a global monitoring system in place, or under development, we could begin to look at how we might regulate the global commons through regulation of the actions of nation states within their own territories and Economic Zones.

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 rbrowngaldosinccom  rbrowngaldosinccom  

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.

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!

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.