Simon Greener has university qualifi cations in geomatics, computing science,database technologies, and project management.He started his working career with mining and surveying experience. He then foundhis calling as a computer scientist with his fi rst job as a database programmer onIBM mainframes for Telstra. He switched to GIS three years later through workingin a multi-disciplinary GIS research team at Telecom's Research Laboratories (TRL)in Clayton, Victoria. While at TRL, he worked on projects whose outcome saw thecreation of what is now Telstra's Sensis group.After leaving TRL, he worked as a lecturer and consultant for CenSIS (Universityof Tasmania) under Professor Peter Zwart, writing student and technical trainingcourses. While there, he continued to consult to Telstra's Directory Services andMobile groups. It was here that he came in contact with the Spatial DataBase Engine(SDBE) from Geographic Technologies Incorporated (GTI) and saw its potentialfor the management of large scale spatial databases within relational databasetechnologies, a merging of his IT and GIS worlds. This led to the foundation ofSalamanca Software Pvt Ltd (SalSoft), for which he was a Director until it waspurchased by ESRI Australia in 1996.Some notable achievements while at SalSoft included helping brokers with thesale of SDBE to ESRI Inc (now ArcSDE), winning the fi rst ArcSDE sale to Telstra topower its White pages/Yellow pages mapping portal, co-authoring a geocodingspecifi cation for Spatial Decision Systems (now Sensis), consulting for GeographicTechnologies Australia on numerous projects based on Universal Press streetdirectory data, and the creation of GeoCASE/Blueprint, the world's fi rst datamodeling tool that enabled the modeling of spatial data and relationships.In 1997, he was appointed GIS Manager for Forestry Tasmania (FT) in Hobart,Tasmania. While at FT, he architected the complete revamp of FT's GIS systemsusing Oracle Spatial (being one of the earliest adopters of the Sdo_Geometryimplementation) as the core data management technology. He was concentratingon embedding geospatial data and processing within business systems via a valueoriented,business-centric computing model. He designed and built numeroussystems during those years, the best of which was MapComposer, a three-clickweb-enabled business map production system that, when he left in 2005, had grown(2000-) to over 320 online uses, producing over 50,000 maps a year from a repositoryof over 100 different map templates (still in operation in 2013). His years at FTconcluded with the writing of a GIS Strategy that saw the use of GIS increase yet thecost of the technology to the organization decrease.He left FT in September 2005 for the precarious world of self-employment. He was asometime copyist for Directions Magazine. As a subcontractor to a Spatial distributorin Australia, he wrote a Radius Topology training course and provided RadiusTopology and Oracle Spatial consulting services for them at numerous customer sitesuntil May 2006. From May to August 2006, he was engaged by Spatial, Cambridge,UK, under a UK Government Department of Trade and Industry's GlobalWatchprogram to conduct research and development in relation to enhancing the exportpotential of their latest product, Radius Studio (this resulted in Radius Studio beingintegrated with Feature Data Objects – FDO technology to extend its data accesscapabilities).In his consulting career, he has written a spatial strategy document and conducteda database performance analysis review for a large Tasmanian Governmentdepartment. He has conducted a number of Oracle spatial database best practice,tender and system, and return on investment reviews at a number of VictorianGovernment departments. He wrote and delivered a user requirements documentfor Enterprise GIS at a large Australian corporation. He also provided guidanceand implementation services to an ambulance service helping integrate OracleSpatial into a data warehouse project that used Oracle Portal, Discoverer, andData Warehouse Builder. He delivered many solutions for a NSW water authority;and fi nally, he successfully completed many migration, publication, return oninvestment, process improvement, and database design contracts for a numberof Canberra-based Federal Government departments. Simon makes available acollection of PL/SQL and Java-based sample solutions for the Oracle database via hiswebsite. He is also principal programmer for the SQL Developer spatial extension,GeoRaptor. Finally, he was awarded, the 2011 Oracle Spatial Excellence Award forEducation and Research by Oracle.His technical areas of expertise include systems design and architecture (spatial andattribute), data management, and modeling in both the OLTP and OLAP spaces, andhe is also an evangelist for O-RDMS-based spatial data. He is available for free-lancegeospatial solutions architecture work, Java and PL/SQL programming, and heprovides Oracle Spatial benchmarking and performance enhancement services.His non-technical interests are his family, friends, walking, reading, singing, andmotorcycle riding. Siva Ravada earned a PhD degree from the University of Minnesota in the fi eldof Spatial Databases before joining Oracle's Spatial development team. He is now aSenior Director of Development at Oracle Corporation. At Oracle, Siva was one ofthe founding team members of the Spatial development team before taking over theteam management responsibilities. Siva now manages the Spatial and MapViewerdevelopment teams at Oracle. He has more than 15 years of experience in spatialdatabases and application development. He has also co-authored more than 30articles published in journals, and holds more than 30 patents. He has also presentedkey-note speeches at several conferences on the topics of spatial databases and GIS.Oracle is the second largest software company and the number one databasecompany in the world.
