...a department of government or the insurance business. It might be very generic in nature. A platform for a web-delivery system is something we are moving towards in the introduction of SOA and that is something that our partner, Borland, is involved with.
How did you go about implementing SOA?
We ran a pilot last year, simply to establish the pros and cons. It was extremely successful and we used it to talk to an awful lot of our customer groups, telling them of some of the things we could do if we were to operationally implement SOA.
For two or three of the customer groupings, such as defence and the roads and highway agencies, there was strong interest in the sort of flexibility that SOA could offer, certainly in terms of the pace and speed with which we could create new styles of delivery.
We are going ahead with a project that started two months ago and will wind up around October or November this year, providing two demonstrators, one for operational trial next winter in the roads environment and one to be trialled in the defence environment.
We had the idea that we will be looking at implementing operational services in the summer of next year.
What SOA could mean for the Met Office is huge. The amounts of data are huge. When we talk about terabits, that is simply the data that, at the end of the day, we retain, as opposed to the many terabits of data, which could be satellite imagery, that might only keep for 10 or 12 hours.
The [SOA] project can really have quite a profound implication for the amount of information we handle
David Underwood, Met Office
The project can really have quite a profound implication for the amount of information we handle.
And we want to make information accessible but, if people want to extract large amounts of data, that can have profound implications on our web architectures and that sort of thing.
Is SOA the sort of architecture that gives you true flexibility?
Yes. Ultimately it takes you away from bespoke platforms completely. All you need is a suitably web-enabled terminal, with the addresses and connections to the sources of information you wish to access. So, once it has been web-enabled and you have permission to use it, then you can actually create products — what we would describe as being able to very rapidly prototype, format and style the delivery that helps the customer answer the question they have got.
What sort of products?
Seldom are they actually interested in the volume of rain or the temperature. It is usually the consequence of that: "How much energy will I sell? How much gas might I have to pump? How much water might I have to move?"
If you are the NHS, it might be: "How many admissions might I have to take?" They are not interested in the basic information. It is that we have worked in combining our information with their information in a form that adds new intelligence.
So, for the NHS, we may prepare information on the number of chronic pulmonary conditions they might have to admit. They can take their information on the number of people who have the conditions and correlate that with the weather conditions.
Better than that, by forecasting four or five days ahead and feeding that information to the primary care division, they are able to intervene and stop it becoming an admission.
So you work very closely with the NHS?
We are developing that at the moment.
How does SOA help?
It makes it all the easier to tailor the delivery of our information to meld with theirs, very simply. And this can come from comparing things which, by themselves, are not easy to see, like marine environment data with hospital admissions. Odds are that there is nothing particularly useful to be gained, but it is an example of two data sets that, if you had wanted to overlay them in the past, it would have involved two or three man months of work. Now we can do it in two or three minutes.
For defence, they would want to take our information and mine it with defence intelligence information into their operations.
