April 2013 Archives
Editor’s Desk: Can Do, Will Do
Think about what ties together the following challenges put forth in this issue. How do surveyors develop new markets for your services? How can you objectively examine a controversial boundary-surveying subject? How can you enrich mapping with extended data? And how is it that researchers dream up cutting-edge technologies surveyors use on land and in […]
Feature: Hydrographic Research and Development
From Science and Engineering to Your Hydrographic Toolkit “The complexities of and incubation times for advancing instrumentation are often not fully appreciate ”—T. Curtin, E. Belcher, Innovation in Oceanographic Instrumentation (2008) Extraordinary—yet mostly unseen—innovations continue to shape the tools surveyors use on water and land: innovations in science and engineering for hydrography, oceanography, robotics, and global navigation […]
Feature: Low-tech Field? Think Again with DLC Resources
A Phoenix-based landscaping company tries mobile mapping to collect “big data” quickly for a plant density study. Their high-tech solutions illustrate the increasing importance of spatial data management for everyone. When people think about landscaping, “high tech” doesn’t immediately come to mind. After all, this is work involving dirt, manual labor, and plants. Mechanical engineering may […]
Rules of the Game: Coordinates as Boundary Evidence
Judicial, geodetic, and practical considerations Editor’s note: Mention “coordinates” in relation to cadastral surveying to a group of land surveyors and you will likely raise eyebrows and voices—often the conversation leads to a mischaracterization of the issue as somehow being “coordinates versus monumentation.” Although many countries (and even states and individual jurisdictions in the U.S.) have already […]
Northern Lights: Mining the 55th Parallel
Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia and a bush camp in northwestern Labrador. On the surface the two communities are a nation apart, separated by more than 3,300 kms (1,865 miles) of woodland. One province flanks the Pacific Ocean as the other hugs the Atlantic. Yet geographical gap is just the tip of the iceberg of divergence. […]
Web Waypoints: Databased Mapping
An interactive exercise merging the topo-graphical and the topo-logical Editor’s note: Just about any interaction we have with the digital world is enabled through the power of database technology: our smartphone apps, the web, shopping, work, and play. A lot of this is behind the scenes and taken for granted. Data-collection software for surveying is becoming increasingly […]