Information islands¶

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 .