What is a Content Pack?

When I talked about building water applications using IBM Smarter Water SDK, I omitted a key ingredient needed by the application, its content. For and application to function it needs supporting content such as; data, business reports, key performance indicators (KPIs), and standard operating procedures (SOPs). In the Smarter Water SDK, the application's content comes in the form of a content pack. We can think of a content pack as a container that holds lots of different types of content, content that that be both consumed and produced by the application. Here is a diagrammatic representation of the Smarter Water application content pack.

Smarter Water Content Pack

Application development using IBM Smarter Water SDK follows an model-view-controller pattern (MVC). Using this pattern; the application is the controller, the content pack is the model, and the Smarter Water Platform provides the view (other views can be plugged in here as well). This allows the content to be changed independent of the application so that we can easily add new KPIs and custom reports as our understanding of the application grows. We will come back to this topic again in a later blog.

IBM's Smarter Water SDK Model View Controller Pattern

Let us examine the content of the content pack in more details

Data sources - Understand the external systems (e.g. work equipment: devices, sensors, meters, etc)

Identify the external system that the application needs to pull data from, or interface to, in order to function. Example of such external systems are; (water) meter devices, sensors devices, loggers, enterprise asset management systems (EAM), customer relationship management systems (CRM), GIS systems, ERP system etc.. Once these particular systems are identified the application developer much also understand the format of the data that is been external systems provide. The data in on-boarded using an enterprise service bus and mediations are responsible for routing the data to the various sub systems and data stores.

Events - The enterprise service bus and the mediations are also responsible for handling and dealing with events. These events can be external event such as a weather event, or events from the meters and sensor devices, such as a no read. These events can also be generated by the application. 

Database extensions – Create the corresponding application specific IOW persistence stores 

Based on the format of the data from the external systems, such as the measurements and measurement values from sensor or meters, the corresponding database stores need to be created within the Smarter Water Platform. Examples of the kind of data stores that an application developer may want to create would be; reporting, operational, analytics and geospatial persistence data stores

Water information hub/Semantic model - Extend the IOW Semantic Model to support the clients water model

Based on the application requirements and the types of external systems the semantic model, at the heart of the Smarter Water Platform (IOW), can be extended to model these systems to provide a overall view of the water network. This semantic model also allows the application to perform meaningful queries, fine grained filtering validation and inferencing. For more information see Tim Hanis dW article on using semantic models.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - Create application specific KPIs

Discover, specify and implement the KPIs that the application needs to report on. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable measurements employed by organizations to monitor and assess performance. See Allen Smiths dW article Part 1 & 2 on KPIs

Custom business reports - Gain insight from historical data with reporting, scorecards, clustering etc.

Custom business reports, also know as descriptive analytics, provides simple summaries about the sample and about the observations that have been made. Such summaries may be either quantitative, i.e. summary statistics, or visual, i.e. simple-to-understand graphs. These summaries may either form the basis of the initial description of the data as part of a more extensive statistical analysis, or they may be sufficient in and of themselves for a particular investigation.
For example, the asset maintenance history of a water pipe is a descriptive statistic that summarizes the quality of a water pipe. 

Standard operating procedures

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) can also be launched by an application via the underlying eventing mechanism. SOPs are essential to an organization's ability to deliver consistent, measured, high-quality responses to complex events. An SOP might be related to automatically detecting a failure in a sensor and opening a work order to have it repaired, or to dealing with approaching severe weather. Regardless of the reason for the standard operating procedure, if an organization develops a planned, understood (and rehearsed) response to various events it can better respond to that incident quickly, and consistently. See Bob Patten dW article on SOPs.

Advanced analytics algorithms

The  Smarter Water SDK also gives application developer access to three types of, advanced business analytics such as; descriptive Analytics (historical insights), prescriptive/optimization analytics (optimization), and predictive Analytics (predication). We have already addressed descriptive analytics in the custom reporting section and this section of the content pack deals with any algorithms needed for optimization or predicative analytics. An example here would be a predicative algorithm that is used to predict when pipes are going to fail.

In the next blog we will look at building out a content pack for the pressure management application