GIS in the surveyor's office?

[Dr__KarenMulcahy]

TASK: A group of local surveyors has asked me to come and speak about GIS in the surveyor's office. 

MY BACKGROUND - I have 25 years of experience in GIS in various capacities, currently as a university teaching professor for GIS, GPS and cartography but do not have  significant CAD experience.

AUDIENCE: This will be primarily a group of independent surveyors who focus on boundary surveys, topo creation and construction staking.   There may be others from larger firms, but they are not my primary target group.

QUESTION 1: I am working through the ArcGIS for AutoCAD materials and I am curious as to how the add-on might benefit this audience.

QUESTION 2: In what other ways might surveyors find GIS a benefit in their workflow besides the add-on?

Any suggestions or assistance would be enormously helpful.  Karen

PS - they gave me a two-hour block of time and the talk is Friday. sigh.

[DonKuehne]

Karen,

The ArcGIS for AutoCAD application is useful for surveyors who are familiar with editing in AutoCAD but that are tasked with generating content destined for GIS, either as the primary or secondary work product.   With just the free plug-in they can get free basemaps connect to valuable data services and generate attributed ArcGIS datasets within their AutoCAD .DWG files using the skills they already possess in AutoCAD.

Here are some other ideas for GIS for Surveyors: GIS for Surveying

-Don

[MelitaKennedy]

I've sent you two documents (to the ecu.edu address) that discuss how to handle data in a local plane grid.

if you have time (ha-ha), you might check out surveyorconnect.com and search on GIS to see what kind of issues come up. Here's a thread where the surveyor was going to present at the South Central Arc Users Group: What am I going to do? | SurveyorConnect

Melita

[Dr__KarenMulcahy]

Melita,

Thanks for your response! I will check out the thread and if you wouldn't mind, can you retry sending the files? I have looked around but cannot find them. 

You guys are awesome!  Karen   mulcahyk@ecu.edu or mulcahyk@yahoo.com

[MelitaKennedy]

Just sent to the yahoo account. The attachments are two word docs, so the email system may be marking it as spam.

[Dr__KarenMulcahy]

The thread was fascinating being from the other side of the monitor.  It is better to be prepared and reminded that surveyors and GIS folk are still seeing the world from very different perspectives. I am simultaneously more nervous and less.

[ChrisPucci]

I'm a surveyor and use GIS all the time! Things I use it for:

Image extraction for AutoCAD overlay.

Utility data extraction for survey planning and survey QC in AutoCad.

Easement/Deed reference management in a real Spatial environment.

Working with data that comes from different sources/different projections &  datums & etc.

Getting tons of Taxlots with data for mailings/owner info/etc

Things I'd like to see Surveyors use GIS for - spatial data management. Collect the data now, store it somewhere, use it again and again and again... But then we'd all need to get off local projections and get with the times and start using real useable projections that can be transformed/converted/etc.

Good luck.