With all of the deserved celebration this week on the 40^th anniversary of Apollo 11, I think it is good time to look at these events in a wider context, and to perhaps challenge our conventional views of expansion and exploration.

The NASA Apollo missions were well named, in that Apollo was the God of Colonization. His rise in the pantheon of Greek Mythology coincided with the expansion of Greek civilization in the Mediterraean in the period 750-550 BCE. Many will see the Apollo project as the beginning of a new era of colonization as we move to become a “multi-planetary species“. For others, this is just the continuation of the great westward expansion of European civilization, now elevated to a global initiative.

Of course, there is another way to look at things. The Greek colonial expansion was driven as much by the denuding of local forests and the collapse of farm lands than it was by the desire to seek new frontiers and travel into uncharted waters. (see http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3108) Clearly the Greeks, for all their learning, had not mastered the art of sustainabilty.

Likewise, one can see the European expansion and westward colonization as driven primarily by economic factors and the need to settle and feed a rapidly growing population. The impact of that expansion on plant and animal species around the globe, from the forests of India to the bison of the American plains, underscores how little had been learned about provisioning for society in a sustainable fashion.

Now, on the anniversary of the end of the first great “moon race”, some people talk about the “need” to go to Mars, and how the U.S. and international public has lost the spirit of adventure that drove the earlier explorations. These same people want to build a new momentum and the budget for a new adventure into space, claiming that it expresses man’s deepest and most basic desire.

Some people talk of an expansion into space also as an economic activity - to find new worlds to populate - to find new mineral and energy wealth. It is, for them, a continuation of the great ocean voyages and the “opening” of the Americas. This, of course, neglects both the energy cost of moving anything off the surface of the earth, and fact that the Americas were already populated long before European arrival.

I believe that it is a time to challenge such ideas. As someone who grew up in the Age of Aerospace, I fully understand the romanticism that is being peddled. I am no tree-hugging environmentalist, and I am as guilty as the next in terms of personal responsibility to the environment. At the same time, I think we need to “put aside childish things” and recognize things for what they are.

We may indeed one day become a multi-planetary species, but this will not happen until we become a planetary society and learn to manage ourselves, and our impact on the world, in a manner with less implied hubris, and with firm grip on the finite character of our planet and ourselves.

This is not to say we should not have big dreams, nor that we should not be optimistic about our ability to rise to the challenges that face us. It is about realizing where we are and re-orienting our thinking and our priorities. Solutions to problems on earth that enable us to feed, clothe, and house our society in a modestly equitable fashion should be just as exotic, just as deserving of praise, just as worthy of the dreams of our young people as reaching for the distant stars or the nearby planets. NASA captured this very well a few years ago with its program “Mission to Planet Earth“. Let’s get that part right. Let’s embrace our planetary society while making peace with one another and all of the species with which we co-habitate upon this planet. Then, when we are ready, when it makes sense - we can go to the planets and beyond.

So its my task to defend SOAP and so with a heavy dose of jet lag, I woke up this morning and intended to dive into the technical detail and start a technical ‘Battle Royal’ (one of my favourite films by the way) with my fellow panelists. However, my Sales Director keeps telling me that its time that Snowflake stops thinking technical features and focuses more on customer requirements. SME businesses like Snowflake often adopt a “build it and they will come strategy” – attracted by the latest technology and believing that customers want the latest big thing. That’s the line I want to take in putting my case for SOAP. Not a technical one, but a business one. SOAP is requirement its not a matter of whether there’s better webservices technology out there.

Snowflake supplies Data Exchange solutions to communities with large data volumes and complex data models. These communities are like super tankers, they define a course and stick to it. As it stands today a lot of these tankers left the dock and long time ago, way before the likes of RESTful became the next big thing. Communities have done the hard work, they’ve agreed exchange models and defined an architecture for data exchange. Its based on SOAP and its now time to implement. People want SOAP because its defined in their architecture, yes the new kids on the block are more agile, easier to use and hold a good technical argument, but you can’t get away from the fact that SOAP has momentum and people bought into it many years ago. There are many huge communities who are building with SOAP and the WS-* stack. In fact, entire countries have web services standards that mandate SOAP as a means of participating in centralized government infrastructure . No matter what technical argument, SOAP wins because it’s the building blocks of infrastructure.

By Ian Painter, Snowflake Software

GeoWeb’s first Business Issues Panel brings together a panel of experts in executive business issues, technology, and standards to discuss the impact new applications, the availability and accessibility of data, and the GeoWeb infrastructure have on the ability to solve such pressing business problems as finding new customers, increasing productivity, better financial management, developing better products, becoming more competitive, developing more efficient and safer operations, increasing speed to market, and improving internal and external communications. Find out how the GeoWeb infrastructure creates new business opportunities and new business models. Find out the business questions and answers you need to implement location solutions into your business—what data? Where’s the data? When is interoperability an issue? What’s the ROI?

This panel will be moderated by Natasha Léger, Editor of LBx Journal, the new multi-media resource for location intelligence exclusively focused on translating geospatial applications in the language of business for business professionals interested in exploring the location dimension of business. Panelists are Craig Bachmann, ITF Advisors; Clemens Portele, Interactive Instruments; Sean Gorman, FortiusOne; Sam Solt, Clear Path Labs. Each panelist will tackle a different business issue.

Sean Gorman, CEO of FortiusOne will be talking about how to harness the deluge of data emerging from location aware devices, dynamic feeds, sensors, web services, enterprise warehouses and the public domain to provide business insight. It is the convergence of enterprise data with the “Web of Things” (Web connected locationally aware devices) and web-based GIS that increases the business intelligence value of internal and external data.

For instance this map of Brightkite (social networking data from a location enabled mobile device) check-ins and Starbucks locations:

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/5825

You can now track the proximity of mobile customer activity to retail locations and also crawl to see if they are talking about coffee or the brand. Traditional demographics could also be added to the map to look at correlations with a target market segment.

The same way we have dashboards (Google Analytics and Omniture) to map web traffic to our sites we’ll have personal dashboards to map our mobile application patterns. Whether those are your patterns, your customer’s patterns or potential customer’s patterns.

Specific to Vancouver GeoCommons has a map of TransLink Sky train usage

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/6552

Vancouver carbon emissions compared to the rest of Canada

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/6553

Lastly an article the Vancouver Sun ran this year where they used GeoIQ to map out parking tickets in Vancouver then contributed the data to the public domain.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/most-ticketed-areas.html

Find out more at the panel session about this search-based approach to location intelligence can help identify new revenue growth, what FortiusOne calls visual intelligence.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have been around for some time now, and are often used for file sharing applications over the internet. In a P2P topology, every computer connected to the network can be a peer, and no central server is required. This makes P2P networks very flexible, scalable, and reliable as there is no single point of failure. These capabilities also make P2P networks very suitable for the GeoWeb, as their architecture easily allows sharing and synchronization of heterogeneous, distributed, geospatial data over the Web.

All peers are equally capable of providing and consuming resources, and they can advertise resources that they want to share to other peers that maybe interested in sharing them. Given the dynamic structure of the GeoWeb, where new geospatially-related data appear rapidly and in ever growing quantities, this is the only architecture that can handle these proliferating environments. This has already been proven in other application domains, such as the use of Voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) technologies like Skype for tele-communications.

But a Peer-to-Peer structure alone is not sufficient for a pervasive, dynamically-changing GeoWeb. The architectural infrastructure of Event Driven (ED) capabilities are also needed, for enabling the automation of data sharing and replication as well as for handling notifications about changes and their metadata. An ED architecture is particularly necessary in collaboration environments, such as in crisis management, that require realtime data exchange to gain a common operating picture.

SOAP-based web services, as well as RESTful architectures, are still following a client/server paradigm as they expect a specific functionality to be returned by a request even if the request response is asynchronous. This impedes agility, as the consumer and the provider of the functionality are depending on each other. Both architectures allow a decoupling of the message or interface level from the implementation, but not from the functionality. Even in an orchestrated controller environment, such as a BPEL-driven service component architecture, the controller needs to know which functions to call to get an expected result.

In contrast, in a ED/P2P architecture, the functionality of distributed system components is totally decoupled. The component that creates an event does not need to know what a subscriber to this event will do with it, or even whether any component is interested in the event at all, and the publisher of an event does not direct any event directly to a consumer component. The subscriber to an event relies only on the information published, and is unaware of where and by whom the event was created. The subscriber may change the functionality that is driven by this event at any time, without the event producer having any knowledge of such a change.

Paired with the scalability and flexibility of the P2P network, the GeoWeb becomes a dynamic horizontally- and vertically-scalable infrastructure that can support and integrate many application domains, especially geospatial applications that are driven by realtime information, such as in Aeronautical Information Management. In such an event-driven architecture, the more rigid orchestration component of a web services architecture using SOAP or REST is replaced by a Publication/Subscription framework that is totally decoupled and autonomous. This fulfills the general notion of the Web as having no centralized administration point or authority that drives the overall functionality that is available anywhere to its users.

Talking with VerySpatial, Ron Lake shares his view of the GeoWeb as being a digital nervous system for the planet. Mr. Lake explains how the theme for this year’s conference, Cityscapes, was selected to emphasize ways that the GeoWeb can support high value sharing and collaboration of urban infrastructure data around the building of cities. Mr. Lake also discusses the introduction of an Academic Track to this year’s conference, how the interaction between academia, industry, and government may spark new perspectives and ideas, and how bringing such a diverse audience together is what makes the conference work. Listen to the interview.

In this time of economic turmoil, governments around the world have focused a great deal of money and energy on the construction sector, earmarking billions of dollars for infrastructure projects. Much of this construction is critical to replacing aging infrastructure (bridges, highways), and to reducing the carbon emissions and energy consumption of our built environment. It should not be seen only as a matter of economic stimulus or putting people to work. It must equally be seen as an investment in meeting critical energy and environmental security objectives for, if not, we will place future generations in an even more perilous position than is currently the case. How do we do this? Where is the information technology to not only increase the productivity of the AEC sector, but also to ensure that this information is acquired, validated, and made available for decision making? How will we know if the money is being well spent? Unemployment figures will not be a sufficient measure.

I believe that the source of low and declining productivity in the AEC sector is, in part, the poor facilities for collaboration and information sharing. “Fit and Interference” problems, which are the bane of the construction industry, are exceedingly rare in the manufacturing sector, and I believe this difference is largely to be attributed to better information management. Instead of dedicated and permanent systems to share information and collaborate on infrastructure projects, architects, engineers, and construction companies rely on ad hoc exchanges by e-mail or couriers. In spite of the billions spent on physical infrastructure projects, strategic investments in IT for infrastructure management by all levels of government are minuscule.

Fortunately, the solution to the AEC productivity crisis can also go a very long way to helping us with the accounting and management of infrastructure spending from the perspective of climate change and energy management. Information infrastructure that supports collaboration and integration of government and private sector business processes for architecture, engineering, and construction can also provide us with the foundation for energy and environmental “accounting”. It only requires that governments see stimulus as truly an investment!

GeoWeb 2009 will be held in Vancouver, July 27-31. As always, GeoWeb is concerned with the reciprocal intersection and impact of the Web and Geo, as well as the social, technical and business implications of that exchange. GeoWeb is a very important event, more than any other on the geospatial calendar, offering the opportunity to visualize and contribute to the direction of the industry.

One of those interesting directions, to be hi-lighted at GeoWeb 2009, is the role of information sharing and information infrastructures in the urban landscape (Cityscapes). Considering the recent announcements of significant investments in large capital infrastructure projects such as highways, mass transit, and remediation of buildings for energy conservation and pollution reduction, this focus on urban environments is even more relevant than in the past. All of these initiatives demand information management, and systems that deal easily with 3D information, design information, and the whole process and life cycle of construction. This will demand new approaches and new ways of thinking, some of which were highlighted at GeoWeb 2008, and we look forward to expanding our efforts in 2009.

Of course, non-Urban applications (oceanography, national defense, oil and gas, utilities) will continue to form a key part of the GeoWeb conference, as will pure technology presentations and papers; this is all about collision and intersection. Developments in GeoWeb technologies for national defense will have impact in the urban world. Equally developments in the urban world may have important implications for apparently disparate domains like undersea exploration or the study of the atmosphere.

We will be back at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue in beautiful Vancouver (plan your holiday), and we will have a full slate of invited speakers, keynotes, workshops, and technical presentations. There will be a fireworks dinner cruise and, of course, the student contest is back!

GeoWeb 2009 has added some new twists to the format of previous conferences, such as the Science/Academic track on 3D modeling, to be held in the adjacent Segal Center. Whether a Cityscaper or not, we hope you will get your presentations in. We are all very excited about 2009 and hope you are too – so plan to attend the most important event on the geospatial calendar!