Jan Van de Steen
Service Line Manager
Geographic Information Systems
Capgemini
Belgium

Biography
Mr. Jan Van de Steen has 25 years experience with GIS in water, electricity, and gas utilities, in telecom and in public administrations. He is a GIS 'thought leader' and manages the GIS Service Line of Capgemini in Belgium. Through white papers and presentations, he communicates his geo-centric vision on society. He also acts as chairman of the Flemish SDI-board, an advisory committee to the regional SDI policy in Flanders.

Abstract
Optimizing geographically time-aware geographic applications

"Being Smart" often means "being at the right place on the right moment". A smarter world would be a world in which man has more control over where and when things happen. Already today, business optimization programmes are using time and location dimensions to improve effectiveness or efficiency. From service dispatching and routing, to optimized project planning and environmental risk management, it is all a matter of understanding where and when things happen, and predicting or planning where they will happen. In a world full of invisible infostructures with millions of connected devices and sensors, huge amounts of time-stamped information become available. Recently, with the broad utilization of GPS and other locating techniques, more and more events are not only time-stamped, but also location-stamped. Using these large volumes of geo-temporal data represents a major "big data" challenge. Geo-event- processing services are essential for filtering out relevant information from the event data flows, delivering comprehensive decision-ready information to businesses. Analysis of recorded information then provides insights to optimize future operations and plans. Two geo-temporal concepts are generally applicable to time-aware geographic applications:

- Geo-conflicts: when it is undesirable that 2 planned events happen too closely to one another in time or location. For instance construction work on a road may be undesirable for traffic when another project is ongoing on a parallel road section.
- Geo-synergies: when it is desirable that 2 planned events happen together, for instance 2 employees traveling individually from home to their work location, may benefit from car-sharing

The presentation highlights the opportunities and constraints of time-aware applications, emphasizes the need for "fuzzy logic" analysis in optimization, and illustrates with real operational examples that will be inspirational to the audience