Gigabytes per second

Those with geospatial and visualization interests will nod their heads right off as they read Peter Brantley’s summary of “The Sensing Earth”, via O’Reilly Radar. Some bits:

Everywhere I look in the natural sciences, there is a sudden, significant maturing of large-scale distributed science projects that involve active real-time sensing of one of more aspects of the physical planet and its environs…

The insight that my friend Brian brought back from the ISDE conference [5th International Symposium on Digital Earth] is that there is an increasingly visible “bright line of digital information” that — like a great river — cuts between two wholly different ranges of data. On one side, there is already extant (either actively digitized, or digitally prepared) data gathered, harvested, and presented for discovery and use. This is the land of Google and other search engines, grabbing the world’s available online data, indexing it, mining it, integrating it with other data sources, and provide compelling windows into a comparatively static and viscous digitized world. That’s where a good measure of CS/EE and IR attention rests now.

The other side of the Bright Line are the data lying latent upon the earth, sky, and space, sleeping quietly until they are woken with sensing, and now flooding real-time like a sea, imminently bursting forth across our international network of high speed science grids.

There are tremendous opportunities here, new ways of thinking about data, about how to develop usable interfaces on a wide range of devices. GEOSS [Global Earth Observation System of Systems] requires us to rethink systems design from the ground up. Scales are refactored: hundreds of large-scale distributed systems, with thousands of sensors linked in community networks, each producing gigabytes or more per second, continuously delivered, and susceptible to combination.

GEOSS projects are seeking radically new forms of systems architectures for data management, on the very edge of science. All of these projects are a click away.

Let’s engage.

Uilleann example

An update on musical Leviathan progress, mostly for my own interest and later retrieval, but with not a little bearing upon the social nature of the enterprise. The project is sort of background activity, something I think about amongst other interests and activities like fence-building and being Designated Shopper for my sister’s household, so progress consists of little steps and not great strides.

I started looking again at MusicBrainz and (instead of reading the documentation) fell immediately into messing about with making an entry for a record in my collection that seemed to be missing from the database: Paddy Keenan’s 1975 Gael-Linn release. No big deal, but one has to experiment with things to gauge what their importance might be. This morning, just 12 hours or so later, I had email indicating that somebody had found my addition and edited it to link to the original liner notes (by Seamus Ennis) on Paddy Keenan’s site, which include mp3s for a couple of the tunes. There’s also a new link to the Wikipedia page on Paddy Keenan. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find that I’ve wandered into an active community, though blundered is more the style of thing.

links for 2007-07-05