The result of this complex infrastructure is a country of clay, bog, sand and water. Yet, on this soil without firm hold we have established cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Delft, complete with their sky touching buildings and robust transport stuctures of roads, airports, harbours and rails, plus, among others, our renowned storm surge barrier. To realize all this, a stable, continuous underground is necessary. Our civil engineers call it the stratum continuum, the deep basic pleistocene layer. It has been there for eons and it gives them, both in the past and in the future, a reliable fundamento for their activities.
Condition is that they know where to find it and how to utilize it.
The metaphor to the world of information can be made easily. Expressions like sea of information', information flow' or overflow' and information hectic' are abundant. Once more, we seem to live in a floody situation and the need for a stable underground is apparant. Whenever people have worked together they have built their networks of information dykes', canals', tunnels' and bridges' and these all found their base in the underlying ubiquitous information layer. Today, this information layer and the communication infrastructure based hereupon are digital.