Academic Committee / Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology - University of Pretoria
Victoria is senior lecturer in the Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. My background is in Computer Science and afterwards I completed my BScHons, MSc and PhD in Geoinformatics. All these qualifications were obtained at the University of Pretoria.
At the University of Pretoria, I teach spatial databases, web mapping and data analysis using open source technology to (mainly) final year geoinformatics students. My passion for open source and open education started when I was introduced to OSGeo community in a database module during my undergraduate degree. I used open source for my postgraduate studies and became part of the OSGeo community officially as a charter member in 2016. As of December 2018, I am currently serving on the OSGeo Board of Directors (2019-2020) and also the GeoforAll co-chair. Over the last couple of years, I have been involved in the UN OpenGIS training of QGIS and PostGIS to operation personal of the United Nations to support UN Peace Operations. I also participated in the 2017 and 2018 Google Code-in and 2018 Google Summer of Code that aims at introducing open source to school learners and university students. Additionally, I am a co-editor for a special issue of the Open Geospatial Data, Software and Standards journal to be published in 2019.
Since 2014, I served as the scientific research secretary of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) WG IV/9 Geo-graphical Visualization Augmented and Virtual Reality. In this position, I have the opportunity to work with international leaders in geovisualization. I am also a member of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) Commission on Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization and the Commission on SDI and Standards.