Be smart and stay safe with Geo-coding and a bit of SOA

| Jörgen Dahlberg

I was Tag surfing the other day and up came this interesting article about mobile phone futures. The part that triggered my imagination was the thought of using Geo-coding for proximity alerts.

What if we could save some lives

By combining some disparate pieces of technology with the ideas of Sanjana Hattotuwa we could save lives. It is not just a system that could be used to alert people on landmines. It could be used in urban areas to help people stay safe.

How can we put the pieces together

  1. I knew that I had read a piece about a guy flying across America using Geo-coding to track his flightpath and posting images while in flight to Google maps.
  2. I also remembered a reference to an article explaining how to get the Nokia N95 to work in this scenario
  3. I knew Nokia was incubating a webserver on the phone project

With this knowledge as base I set out to create a sketch of the system. As usual I sketched on paper…

Paper and pen sketch of the solution
After that I refined the sketch to a design explaining the scenario

A picture of the scenario for a proximity alert syste using services on the net

Pulling the pieces apart

  1. The Nokia N95 phone
  2. shozu.com used to transfer media to online services
  3. flickr.com used to store media
  4. Google my maps used to display danger zones
  5. People surfing my Google maps on the web
  6. People walking in a danger zone using the system to avoid being hurt. The blue line is the safe path and the red triangles are dangerous areas
  7. The mobile phone webserver. Publishing detailed proximity alerts between people in the local area
  8. Page of particular proximity alert
  9. Another page of a proximity alert

So the users walk about in the danger zone taking pictures and films of dangerous areas, sending the media in real time to online services. Other people who must pass through the area downloads the information from the online service and pass safely.

Question

Is this SOA? Well I think this is a perfect example of SOA.

2 thoughts on “Be smart and stay safe with Geo-coding and a bit of SOA”

  2. My view of SOA is best described from two different perspectives.

    1.) The Information Technology SOA, where one partition the implementation in services which communicate and create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

    2.) The business side of SOA, where one view different companies and the services they offer as building blocks that can be used in a value network. This would create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

    In this article my statement that this is SOA, would satisfy both of the views.

    I’ve written an article on how I explained the IT SOA to a group of people: https://enklare.wordpress.com/2007/10/20/the-social-side-of-soa/

    Other articles about SOA can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture

    Reply

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