Local First Workflow
A realisation of working with several real world projects is that resources are limited and speed to insight is crucial.
We are seeing a movement back from the cloud to a hybrid cloud/edge setup in the digital twin space. This is because processing power is increasing on computers and devices, and companies are realising the cost of cloud services is quite high. The uploading of raw data is also a bottleneck in many cases.
So the processing of raw data is moving to the edge, a computer close to the data source - and also the user workstation.
We believe many tasks can be moved locally with a smooth setup and user-friendly interface. Built with the same code base as the online deployment. Then the collaboration and data analysis can be done in the cloud with all the amazing benefits already well established.
The setup is a bit technical, but being able to process data directly from file or in connection to a local Speckle Server, or n8n workflow instance, is incredibly powerful.
Especially as AI is being integrated into local workflows.
A potential way to establish collaborative workflows through the Internet is by using the principles of the Speckle platform.
The DTCV Platform instances can be linked through the Speckle Server workflow by checking in and out data between a central server and the local instances.
Online servers could be used as the "master branches" of different projects and integreated into the digital twin city data pipeline.
This is an emerging idea that we started to explore in the Design and Data project, and will have to explore more in the future!