telematics

Technology

2022

We explain what telematics is, its origin, advantages, disadvantages and multiple applications. In addition, its humanistic relevance.

Telematics is the crossroads of telecommunications and computing.

What is telematics?

Telematics or teleinformatics is a discipline scientific and technological, which arises from the union of the fields of study and application of systems IT and telecommunications. Therefore, telematics is interested in any computerized transmission system of data, from global positioning systems (GPS), to the different types of transmission of data for Internet.

As will be seen, this is a very broad field of knowledge, but broadly speaking it is the design, evaluation, management and the application of communicational models to the transport and storage of information, based on three different basic planes or perspectives:

  • The plane of the Username. Dedicated to the distribution and final information processing;
  • The signaling and control plane. Dedicated to processing the information pertinent to the system itself and its interaction with the user, for the decision making;
  • The management plane. Dedicated to the administration of the operational and administrative information of the system, as well as its interaction with the operators of net.

These three planes make up a global model, and each one is divided in turn into subsystems known as entities of protocol, which group the different functions that an interconnection of different systems requires.

Origin of telematics

The term "telematics" arises from the union of "telecommunications" and "computing", since it is fundamentally a cross between these two fields of study. The word was coined in France in 1976, in a government report known as the Nora-Minc Report, but titled "Computerization of Society."

The emergence of this field of study, however, is given under different names depending on the academy, and can be called Computer and Communications in the Anglo-Saxon, for example, or even compunication (Computer + Communications). However, in many Spanish-speaking countries it is preferred to use the name “Telematic Engineering”.

What is telematics for?

Telematics makes it possible to offer services over a long distance.

On the one hand, telematics deals with the technical or material aspect of the interconnection of computer systems, which is of vital importance in today's globalized world, so dependent on transactions and communications over long distances.

On the other hand, it encompasses applications of humanistic, social and political relevance that cannot be secondary to technological criteria, such as everything related to tele-education, e-commerce, electronic administration (e-government), services massive content and information, and so on.

Telematics applications

The applications of telematics have to do, for now, with:

  • The design of computer networks and better remote data transmission systems.
  • The application of the Internet to many aspects of daily life, allowing the facilitation and abbreviation of procedures.
  • Improvement of the transmission quality of existing networks, by incorporating new ones strategies or new materials.
  • Design of new mechanisms for data collection or information transmission, allowing more informed decisions in different areas: industrial, business, political, etc.

Advantages of telematics

Telematics facilitates economic transactions efficiently and quickly.

The development of telematics brings with it important advances in technological and computational matters, which allows, among other things:

  • It reaches important levels of automation or remote control, which translates into the possibility of carrying out tasks with a minimum of risk human.
  • Increase the productivity and business visibility, through new information gathering strategies and therefore decision-making.
  • It develops new forms of social bond and economic transaction, allowing to overcome great distances efficiently and quickly.

Disadvantages of telematics

The possible disadvantages of the application of telematics are not really a consequence of this discipline, but depend on the specific way in which the telematics Humans we use it.

For example, it can be used to strengthen worrying aspects of our behaviour like the social isolation of future generations, the destruction of jobs replaced by networks of remote control.

It could also be used to design police and repressive protocols that serve to politically subdue people. These possible consequences of telematics, as in many others technologies, they depend more on the aspect ethical Y moral of the profession, that of the contents itself of which she is interested.

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