Impressions from GITA 2008

Physical infrastructure - roads, cities, bridges, sewer and power systems, that sort of thing - is not exactly at the top of the list of most people's ideas of exciting subjects, but they are nonetheless as necessary a part of daily life as food production and transport, oil production and laying of network cable. The GITA 2008 Conference - also known as Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions - has showcased that in very stark detail this year. Seattle once again showed off its reputation as one of the rainiest cities in the country, but the dark clouds and gloom outside served only to highlight the dark clouds and gloom on the inside.

XML - my bailiwick - is mostly about systems and information flow, and over the years I've come to develop a particular sense about systems theory in general, especially when it touches on IT. Yet the people here are system thinker's system thinkers, the ones that not only play SimCity but offered advice to its game designers, and frankly, they're very nervous right now.

Tom Murphy, the former mayor of Pittsburgh and ULI Senior Resident Fellow, gave a sobering view of the state of the American infrastructure: plagues of beetles devouring Hawthorn trees in his front yard as the sharp frost of late winter has failed to materialize (yet again), stagnant federal spending (at 1980s levels) on interstate highways and city streets even as the number of cars on the road has tripled, urban sprawl as the US population hit 300 million people in October 2007, with it projected to reach 450 million by 2050. Murphy told of being notified by the FBI while he was meeting with his police, fire and operations chief that a plane flying over Pennsylvania was not responding to interceptor jets on the 11th of September, 2001, and he had to look his infrastructure gurus in the eyes and ask "What now?"

Later -

"How many of you have changed your daily habits as gas prices hit $3 a gallon?" he asks the crowd - a few hands went up.

"How many of you will change your habits when gas prices hit $10 a gallon?"

Someone in the audience actually gasped quite audibly, and people sat forward more on their seats.  There's too much demand for the basics in the world - oil, water, food, clean air - and when demand exceeds supply radically, infrastructure suffers.

Murphy made a particularly prescient statement (paraphrasing here): "We live at a time when there will be a radical change in our lifestyles, our expectations of wealth and success and in the quality of our lives. These changes will not be pleasant."

Keynotes are intended to provoke, to challenge, to make people ask questions  - and the more uncomfortable the question, the better. "You are the wizards," he also said (again paraphrasing), looking out at the assembled IT managers and architects, "it will be to you that others will turn to make the problems better. It is a stark challenge, but one that you can and will meet."

Lest people think that information technologies is about Facebook apps or the best SOA implementation or whether .NET is better than Java, remember that ultimately we are the wizards, for good or ill, that magic is hard ... and that it always exacts a price for its use. It is our responsibility, our duty, to pay that price.

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Yet all was not so grim or ominous. This was in part a conference celebrating the cartographer's art, and there is something magical in computer-based maps. There were services there for reading arial photographs and turning them into symbolic representations automatically, creating virtual cities in 3D complete with moving cars and people, Sim City writ large.

There was the camera/GPS combo system that would automatically record where you took a picture and post it on to Flickr, or Google Earth or your standalone service.

There was the Wacom Cintiq, a 21"(?!) tablet PC combo that any self-respecting cartographer (or digital artist) would drool over (okay, yes, I did have to wipe the drool away ... I really did apologize).

There was ESRI, the last of the big GIS giants, flanked on each side by Microsoft (Virtual Earth, which continues to just get better and better) and Oracle GeoSpatial, with Google's Earth not present but very much palpable in the room.

There were, finally, the publishers of such high profile publications as energy biz, Geo: Geoconnexion International Magazine, Government Engineering: The Journal for Public Infrastructure and my personal favorite - Transmission & Distribution World, showing a burly engineer wrestling a downed tree off power lines on the cover. Okay, so it may not be Sports Illustrated cover model Marisa Miller, but these show that there's some serious thought (and not a little money) thinking hard about that public infrastructure.

And perhaps, just perhaps, there's a lesson in that.

Kurt Cagle is a research analyst for the Burton Group, specializing in XML Technologies.  He can be reached at kcagle@burtongroup.com.