Category Archives: Surveying
GIS Needs Geodesy
Why Accuracy Matters Now More Than Ever When I entered university to study geodesy in 1976, graduating students had begun their studies with slide rules and thick algorithm books. Pocket calculators were nonexistent, and electronic distance measurement (EDM) devices were heavy, delicate, and cumbersome. No satellite positioning systems were yet available. At that time, the...
The Woodstock of GIS: Inside the Esri UC 2025 Experience
At the San Diego Convention Center in July, thousands of GIS professionals, developers, and geospatial newcomers descended upon the 2025 Esri User Conference, an event one company booth dubbed “the Woodstock of GIS.” It’s an apt comparison: energetic, communal, buzzing with shared ideals and grounded in decades of serious, technical evolution. But unlike Woodstock, the...
How to Win a Boundary Dispute Case
Legal Boundaries There are many players in a boundary dispute case, the judge, perhaps a jury, the parties, the attorneys, and maybe some witnesses. When a surveyor is hired as an expert in such a case, it is not the surveyor’s responsibility to win a boundary dispute case, but the surveyor can play a significant...
The Surveyor and the “Geodesy Crisis”
Surveyor’s Corner By Tim Burch To the average professional surveyor, the term “geodesy” does not exist in their everyday conversations about the business. While the use of state plane coordinates has expanded greatly with the development of GPS/GNSS receivers and RTK/RTN connectivity, the mathematics and “black magic” of geodesy remains an enigma to most of...
Beyond On-the-Job Training
By Tony Nettleman Throughout the history of land surveying, on-the-job training has been a significant portion of employee development. But is that enough? I agree with the premise that businesses must train their employees, and I encourage anyone reading this to act to ensure the future success of not only their own business but the...
Advancements in Parcel Mapping Tools- Part 2
Whether a parcel map is created for an engineering project, land development, valuation, tax assessment, land administration and management, for a subdivision, city, county, or whole country, the tools to create and manage them have dramatically improved. In the past, a key sticking point for surveyors was the lack of solid COGO tools within legacy...