Mind the gap: maintaining service oriented map production infrastructures
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Jobst, M.; 2Gartner, G.
1VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Email: markus@jobstmedia.at
2VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Email: georg.gartner@tuwien.ac.at
Abstract
The public is becoming more and more aware of maps by using navigation, positional and mapping applications in their daily life. It is easier then ever before to run appropriate geospatial software on a smartphone, which is a permanent companion. All sensors that are needed to track the position, heading or even behaviour are embedded. The mobile broadband access to the Internet allows for fast data exchange and realtime analysis of a situation. If all tiers work well a user experiences a highly pragmatic support by the application within different occurring geospatial issues in his life. In the background modern techniques consider geospatial data and services as well as realtime observations. Any access to a content is done via spatial data services in a networked environment, which means that geoinformation is kept once, at the most competent side – the data producer, and is therefore not copied between the computers of stakeholders. This paradigm of distributed data sources and sharing geoinformation becomes not only embedded in map applications, but also in the production work-flows of map creation. In terms of pragmatic usage of these data sources or services specific requirements for the IT infrastructure components, especially the services, occur: quality of services. The quality of services describe their availability, capacity and performance. If these parameters and some others, like bandwidth, are not fulfilled or successful a user may be frustrated and the pragmatic dimension is not established. Involvement with the user will not occur. Additionally map production cycles and procedures are under the risk of complete failure if data sources cannot be accessed or main definitions for an access change. It becomes obvious that infrastructure changes effect not only one single component within the geospatial infrastructure but may effect several components or even the end user. In a map production environment this situation of distributed sources calls for a contract model like a stewardship program. Furthermore the complexity of the production environment grows, which requires appropriate evaluation methodologies for change management, objective scorecards for production environment architecture modification and the identification of component- and user dependencies. This contribution explains the invisible gap between ubiquitous mapping and its service oriented features and the maintenance issues of IT architectures in the background. We highlight the importance of objective scorecards for change management and the establishment of a pragmatic dimension for map usage as well as map production. Examples of traditional work-flows and open data requirements will show the effect on evaluation scorecards and their field of application.
Keywords
map production; service oriented architectures; management