Five Ideas: Spatial
How to get the most out of geospatial data.
October 2008
“The big breakthroughs in Geographic Information Systems are in spatial analytics—the ability to decide where to locate a new store, or, from a scientific perspective, to model changes in landscapes, for example.”—Jack Dangermond, ESRI president.
“The advent of spatially aware databases, which were pioneered by Oracle, and the collaborative internet with Web services and mashups has simplified what used to be a complex problem of processing and integrating geospatial data with core business processes. Web 2.0 applications have also made geospatial technologies more prevalent on the Web.”—Graham Stickler, product marketing director for 1Spatial
“The lines of businesses that have traditionally used spatial were responsible for land and infrastructure management in verticals such as the public sector, utilities, telecos, and energy. Now we’re seeing map displays and location queries being added to business-activity monitoring applications, business intelligence, call centers, retail merchandising management, insurance, to name a few."—Jim Steiner, Oracle senior director of server technology
“What's going to really push us is the implementation of spatial applications on mobile devices. The more people use location-aware phones, the more they can take pictures and geo tag them to add information about that picture. That opens up the whole idea of user-generated spatial content and ‘citizen science,’ where you could empower a whole army of people able to use their camera phones to take a picture of a rare plant and send it and the location to us via the Web.”—Matthew Merrifield, The Nature Conservancy's geographic information systems manager for California
“Users should start with simple steps that have big return on investment. If you have sales territories or coverage areas, enable geographic query and display through maps. If you have assets, enable them to be displayed and analyzed using map technology.”—Mike Turnill, EMEA product manager of Oracle Spatial technologies
