Making Sense of Location: Tracking, Visualizing & Analyzing Movement of People in a Pandemic

In times of a pandemic it is crucial to understand if people have been close enough to each other for long enough to transmit the disease. This means that location-based data need to be analyzed for pair-wise interaction. In this session we will show how Oracle can be used to for these purposes.

Whenever tracking and tracing of people or objects is required, be it in the context of a pandemic, be it for the purpose of law enforcement or be it in the Internet of Things, the underlying infrastructure needs to deal with potentially huge amounts of location-based information. This kind of positional data can explicitly be expressed as coordinates if it comes from a GPS sensor or it can be implicitly included in an address or a building/room identifier, for example. For many years, Oracle has been offering technologies to manage, to analyze and to visualize this type of data. In the latest release, two new functions have been added to support contact tracing, enabling pair-wise matching of location-based data, taking into account a tolerance in both distance and time.
In this session, we will review the fundamentals of database development for geospatial data, both on-premise as well as in the cloud. We will look at tracking and tracing of moving objects, spatial data visualization, as well as these new analytic functions. Several optimizations for handling large volumes of positional data will be explained and we will end with an outlook on how the results of contact tracing can be further analyzed by means of graph analytics to identify indirect contacts, communities or particularly important individuals.