CGIA & GPN Ad Hoc Committee

[hennessee]

The CGIA & GPN Ad Hoc Committee is looking for open-minded surveyors to participate in future meetings to better define roles of GIS Professionals and Professional Land Surveyors. If you're interested, please reach out to Bruce Joffe at bruce.joffe@gmail.com.

Attached is an e-mail from Bruce Joffe with his request.

[rhondawads]

The CGIA & GPN Ad Hoc Committee is looking for open-minded surveyors to participate in future meetings to better define roles of GIS Professionals and Professional Land Surveyors. If you're interested, please reach out to Bruce Joffe at bruce.joffe@gmail.com geometry dash 3d.

Attached is an e-mail from Bruce Joffe with his request.

Is this job still available? I'm interested.

[DWoolley]

For more than twenty-five years I argued and strongly advocated the traditional surveying position in the GIS versus land surveying debate.

I had this discussion with Bruce Joffe in Reno in the mid-1990s at a land surveying conference. My position at the time was that land surveyors, through education and licensure, rightfully controlled the measurement frameworks underlying GIS: reference frames, geodesy, and datum management.

Over time that view has began to change.

Viewed broadly, the surveying profession no longer consistently maintains that depth of geodetic competency. Many surveyors now rely on RTN networks, OPUS solutions, and coordinate-based positioning built on external infrastructure.

The deeper geodetic work that once distinguished surveying—post-processed static networks, rigorous control adjustments, epoch management, and datum transformations—is understood and practiced by fewer licensed professionals each year. Strikingly, I encounter licensed surveyors who not only do not comply with the California Public Resources Code provisions governing coordinate systems, but are unaware that those statutes exist. When those provisions are referenced, many do not know how compliance is achieved in practice.

At the same time, boundary law in California still does not recognize coordinates as defining evidence. Property boundaries remain grounded in monuments, record evidence, and legal doctrine.

This raises an uncomfortable question.

If the profession no longer understands or broadly practices geodetic measurement, should land surveyors continue to claim coordinate systems as part of the professional domain?

Or should the profession focus on what it uniquely provides: boundary law, evidence analysis, and the legal determination of property rights?

The GIS community has extended invitations to collaborate for many years. Too often the surveying profession responded with slogans—“GIS means Get It Surveyed”—rather than clear-eyed and honest discussion.

There comes a point when a profession must take a hard look at its own capabilities and responsibilities. Doing the right thing ethically and honestly may require difficult choices. It may even mean acknowledging that one part of the measurement community - helped by the technology - has outgrown the professional community, and allowing that function to stand on its own.

I brought this up last week in Orange County CLSA, League of California Surveying Organizations and again, at the Legislative Committee meeting.

Perspectives from both surveyors and GIS professionals would be useful. Do we start planning a Viking funeral for measurement?

DWoolley