VTT's Matti Hannus has made a picture well-known in the building-informatics reseach community: the islands of information
The way I'm thinking now, it's much better to start an airline service between the islands (xml, internet, one-on-one connection) than to try to drain the ocean (waiting for the ultimate all-encompassing PDT model). Once one island builds a good airfield (publish an XML/http api) it immediately becomes an interesting target for small airlines (programs can start making use of your data) at the cost of clearing a small airstrip on one of the other islands (adding a reader for the data to the program).
Once the internet gets this ball rolling.... (btw: as a Dutchman with a civil engineering education I find there is nothing principally wrong about draining an ocean... :-)
Update 2006-11-21: Matti's picture is gone, but I found another version .
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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