8 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
8 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
Broadening my Deepwater Horizons
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<p>I’ve gotten used to being cited in computer science and software engineering papers over the last decade, but here’s a new one. Today I read a draft in which I and the GPSD project get cited a bunch of times and it’s – er – <em>not</em> about open source. It’s about Marine AIS in disaster management. Broadening my deepwater horizons, as it were. </p>
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<p><span id="more-3146"></span></p>
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<p>You can read a PDF of <a href="http://vislab-ccom.unh.edu/~schwehr/papers/2011-schwehr-ushydro-dwh.pdf">Vessel Tracking Using the Automatic Identification System (AIS) During Emergency Response: Lessons from the Deepwater Horizon Incident</a>, but be warned that it’s pretty heavy going unless you’re deep into AIS or have a thing for disaster-management porn.</p>
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<p>It’s nevertheless interesting on several levels. Kurt Schwehr, the author, writes well for an academic and manages to make the bureaucratically-clogged portions of the narrative less deadly boring than they might have been. Both the low-comedy aspects of government reaction to the disaster and the heroic attempts to cope with the clusterfuck-in-motion come through pretty clearly.</p>
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<p>I’m only a supporting player in this story, but the paper does illustrate one point I’ve been hammering on for years. Making standards for life-critical systems proprietary is not just stupid, it’s <a href ="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=888">evil</a>. Kurt reports that some work I and the GPSD project guys did helped prevent that from being a problem in his part of the Deepwater Horizon response, and I’m pleased about that. Next time, though, we might not get so lucky.</p>
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<p>Unanswered question: was GPSD running in any of the <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1934">robot submarines</a> they sent in to try to plug the gusher? Inquiring minds want to know…</p>
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