South African Oracle User Group (SAOUG) and AfriGIS have started a new special interest group (SIG). They held their first meeting at Oracle’s head office in late January. Although other SIGs exist, this is the first local one with a focus on Spatial and Graph. The main idea of the group is to provide a forum for Oracle Spatial and Graph, and Oracle MapViewer users to exchange best practices, share project experience and work closer with Oracle as a supplier to identify user needs. It will focus on location data management, geospatial analytics, map visualisations and related topics.
Twenty users from across the GIS industry attended the meeting, including representatives from HERE, Kajima and the Gauteng Health Department. Oracle Germany’s Hans Viehmann, who has started several SIGs around the world, opened the meeting and made suggestions to guide the focus and structure of the SIG. Participants speculate that the group will become a support platform more than anything. Currently there’s no membership fee, but this might change to enable hosting of bigger events. The SIG also elected a chair, Laurette Coetzee (AfriGIS), vice chair Susan Naude (Geospace International) and communications officers Michelle Joubert (SAOUG) and Craig Gers (GISCOE). The group hopes to meet two to three times a year, and have discussed training and workshop programmes specifically for developers and managers.
Speakers Laurette Coetzee (AfriGIS), Anzari van den Berg (Vodacom), and Claude Langley (HERE) showed attendees how they used Oracle Spatial and Graph in their workflows. Issues that came up were around software naming and their precise functions. It was explained that MapViewer was a component of the Oracle Spatial and Graph package rather than a standalone solution for displaying data, and often needs additional programming to get the results users want. A short technical overview of products and their improvements was also given.
Contact Michelle Joubert, SAOUG, Tel 012 654-2913, gm@saoug.co.za
Published in PositionIT Jan/Feb 2014
http://www.ee.co.za/article/spatial-data-sig-launched-2.html
