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iGEM corner: Future Talk Pipe Dreams

 

Article three (July 2002):

Geotechs Go Wireless!

by Mete Oner

In the previous articles in this series, I kept referring to wireless communications and how important it was going to be in geotechnical engineering soon.

It has happened, yes sir!

While I was preparing to write this third article, I searched the web for the two words geotechnical and wireless appeared together and found 3490 pages on Yahoo! and 7,580 pages in Google. What a contrast to the result back in mid-90's when I started GVL-- I searched and searched for just geotechnical and found a grand total of 4 (four) Web pages!

By the way, one of those four Web pages was Louri Consultants, which comes to you from a corner of a giant AOL server these days, but used to be at it own domain, http://www.lourieconsultants.com. We cached it for you, just to protect this little piece of history; here it is.

It seems wireless has invaded the planet in the last few months! Although these Web page counts include repetitive references, and half of them to your iGEM pages here, it is still a large number. Since there are so many, I will only mention a few here.

• Itronix
  Itronix presently offers rugged field computers with wireless, including on-the-go Internet connectivity for the geotechs.
• SAE Inc.
  The Canadian telecommunications, electrical power generation company SAE Inc's Telecommunications Services - Geotechnical Engineering Web page offers a few things their systems can do for you.
• French and Parrello Associates
  Wireless Communications Division of FPA, whose roots are in geotechnical engineering, offers wireless services to many professions, but of course first and foremost to geotechs. Congratulations French and Parello!.
• Seistronix
  Soil Dynamics guys among you will love Seistronix-- they offer a complete wireless Seismic Refraction Seismograph system.
• GEOCOMP
  Last but not least, here is your geotech equipment company gone insanely wireless with your lab as well as field testing! Their Internet-based iSite Central is a must see. They offer an on-line instrumentation database into which data are automatically loaded. Although this service is presently only available for their instrument products. I hope they migrate to an industry standard data interchange standard such as GML. Such a move will make equipment and software inter-operational--a true revolution!

Please see the previous articles to see the incredible things that can be done incorporating this technology in your geotechnical work.

 



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