Technology making the rounds in drought stricken California farmland has the ability to measure soil moisture content every few seconds and transmit data back to a central location over a wireless network. A grid of such sensors can provide enough information to control your irrigation system and give plants exactly the right amount of water whenever it is needed. Sounds like we're on the road to wiring thousands of acres or trees and vines.

"Hold the phone" - not so fast. While chatting to a customer a few months ago we were looking at how we might make better use of weather station (and by extension - sensor networks) data in combination with irrigation management decisions. It seems that having all this data about what the temperature, humidity, etc. was a few minutes ago does not give us enough decision support content to schedule irrigation activities a few days down the track - the key ingredients are "how stressed are our plants right now", "how much water do we have in the tank" and "how hot is it going to be tomorrow". Sounds like our technology footprint is going to have to touch large parts of our existing infrastructure and contain some modeling capability that gives us a stress prediction for a few days ahead. Since I am pretty ignorant about the combination of technology and irrigation infrastructure I threw out a question about why a team of irrigation system foremen were so hands on and there was an absence of automated irrigation system control - turns out that when there is a hole in the drip tape it is helpful to have someone out in the field so that the leak can be spotted and repaired. 

Business Intelligence tools have been able to slice and dice our data for years. But, management teams are reaching deeper into the data, beyond the basics of how good or how bad sales (or quality, or...) are and they are seeking an understanding of where and why. Recent tech giant discussions estimate that 90% of data has a spatial component to it.

Of course, this is where we need to plug in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). More specifically, we need maps that can pull data from our databases and present the data in a manner that is easy to interpret while still supporting the drill down capability that we are familiar with. It turns out that the GIS is the database as all the major database vendors now include the capability to manage spatial content in the data tables. All we need to do now is teach everyone how to write spatial queries....