On Friday Mel, Tom, Andrew and myself went to the ESRI Resource User Group (RUG) meeting, held at the Melbourne Hotel in the central city area of Perth.  The RUG meetings have been held sporadically over the past few years, and whenever I’ve gone I get treated to something unexpected.

This time, it was a presentation from Howard Golden, a Russian based geophysicist (amongst many other qualifications!) who works for Kinross Gold Corporation. Howard gave us an overview of what it is like working in an exploration camp on the Arctic tundra in Russia. Some of the things he covered about GIS data – such as the fact that it was considered secret data until quite recently (and still is in some areas) – were quite eye opening. But not as eye opening as his pictures of the sanitary facilities!

Keith Hickey from Chevron Australia then gave an overview of their work, using GIS to look out for resource conflicts on the massive amounts of construction work coming up for Chevron in the oil fields off Barrow Island. They are importing data from project management software into ArcGIS 10 and then looking for times when these resources (e.g. drill rigs, cable layers, ships, etc) are allocated to be in the same area. It was a different use of GIS than what we do – and the time enablement in ArcGIS 10 was pretty cool!

The RUG was a good event – not just because of the two talks, but also because we got a good solid chunk of time to catch up with people afterwards.

If you are interested in the ESRI RUG events, then contact them at RUG@esriaustralia.com.au to be added to their mailing list.

Otherwise, contact me on email or leave a comment to this post.