Technological advancements are turning the world into an intelligent, instrumented and interconnected place. With these changes come amazing opportunities for society – for every business, institution and individual.
Today, there are around 4.6 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide. Hundreds of satellites orbiting the earth are generating terabytes of data everyday. At the same time, we are heading toward one trillion connected objects in the Internet. There are as many as 30 billion Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags produced globally, embedded in products, passports, buildings and even animals.
They are becoming smarter because they are smartly ‘interconnected’, using the Internet, GPS, RFID tags and other means to communicate with devices around. They are ‘instrumented,’ have the ability to sense their environments and monitor their performance. Furthermore, as Sam Palmisano, CEO, IBM says, Smart systems are becoming the basis of competition between nations, regions and cities. They are changing everything from organisations’ business models to how they enable their employees to collaborate and innovate.
SMARTER PLANET
It is well known and acknowledged that companies, cities and the world is indeed a system of systems. IBM has evolved a three step agenda for building smarter planet. “This consists of a building system which is ‘instrumented’ to collect precise information at the right time, ‘interconnected’ to integrate information across any end-to-end system and ‘intelligent’ which yields new insights that drive action to improve the ultimate outcome. IBM brands this usable information as Informix Database,” according to an IBM spokesperson. He added that some of its characteristics such as embedability, continuous availability, real time data management, spatial data support, scalability and extendibility make it the database of choice for customers implementing smarter systems.
GIS support: IBM Informix database introduces two datablades for GIS support viz. Spatial Datablade and Geodetic Datablade. The Spatial DataBlade brings all the significant features and benefits of IBM Informix to location- based data. It can transform both traditional and location-based data into essential information. It manages spatial data using GIS technologies, ensures precision and accuracy treating Earth as a globe, uses the R-tree index on integrated space, time and numeric dimensions, includes database replication of geospatial data and provides a clean C-language API that’s handy to build new functions that use the same data structures and interfaces.
Real-time data management: Much of the data generated by real life systems are time series – such as flow data or metering data from utility systems such as water or energy distribution. Informix brings a technology called as “TimeSeries” and “Real Time Loader” for managing real time data with great efficiency. This technology shows up to 33 times better performance and up to 70% disk space saving as against the traditional relational database technologies for time series data.
EXECUTION OF THE CONCEPT
So far, IBM proved itself successful in its ambitious smarter planet project with the support of Informix database. Here are a few testimonies.
DEHEMS Project: The core aim of Digital Environment Home Energy Management System (DEHEMS) had to develop and test a home energy management system to reduce CO2 emissions and electricity bills. The project involved installing small, low-cost energy monitoring devices at groups of homes in five European cities. The challenge was the sheer volume of data. Using GIS on Informix TimeSeries, energy monitoring for three million homes or more became a practical proposition. The Informix TimeSeries technologies created a single database object for each data-source, and then simply updated it with the latest readings whenever a new pulse of data arrived.
Trafficmaster: Trafficmaster’s UK services rely on data feeds collected from black boxes in the vehicles of around 80,000 customers, numerous vehicle licence plate recognition cameras and 7,500 roadside sensors. The data collected constantly provides information on the flow of traffic on the national road network. To further innovate its services, the company needed to start collecting data from vehicles every 20 seconds.
It became a real challenge to extract greater value from the increased data volumes. To address this challenge, Trafficmaster took to geospatial technology. As part of this process, IBM and IBM business partner, Integres implemented the IBM Informix database technology and software which receives and processes the vast volumes of vehicle location data.
CONCLUSION
A smart planet requires a smarter communications infrastructure. Only high-speed broadband doesn’t make a network smart. We need smart networks to be multidirectional and must have the ability to get infused with advanced analytics and intelligence.
(Based on inputs provided by IBM)
