Category Archives: Surveying
Professional Service or Commodity?
A Surveyor’s Thoughts on the QBS Process Editor’s Note: This month’s installment of Field Notes was submitted by James Nicolau IV, PLS, on the merits of using the quality-based selection (QBS) process to select surveyors for construction-staking services beyond where it is required under the Brooks Act (Public Law 95-582). When the QBS process is...
GEOID18: Make Your Mark and Improve Your Heights
As a community, we have the unique opportunity to contribute to the densification and improvement of our national geoid model and vertical transformation tools in support of the ongoing modernization of the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS). While the geoid model is a national level product, the impacts of this work are directly felt within...
Mexico City’s Transportation Revolution
Using drones, lidar, and BIM, enterprising surveyors and geospatial engineers designed and constructed the city’s first high-speed train system. Editor’s Note: Lessons learned from a problematic rail project in Mexico City prompted an initiative to pull out all technological stops for a subsequent new rail line. An innovative, tech-savvy firm that had demonstrated its capabilities...
UK Geospatial Apprenticeships Are a Go!
Editor’s note: Great news from the UK … a new program of apprenticeships specifically for geospatial disciplines. This program is expected to help meet challenges of meeting the demand for skilled surveyors and geospatial workers, especially in these times of rapid growth in commercial development and public infrastructure. While apprenticeships have always played an important...
A New Line
Midway through a large and complex transportation project, a team of Belgian surveyors successfully adopted a new class of instrument. Hardware and software modernization doesn’t always yield immediate benefits for enterprises, and sometimes taking a particularly big leap or risk comes at a premium in time and labor. But sometimes everything goes smoothly. Our July...
Teaching Land Stewardship
The focus of the professional surveying societies today seems to be on the decline of the number of surveyors out there. Some are even beginning to raise this level of concern to that of soft panic. From the outside, the surveying community is headed for a perfect storm of obsolescence. Technology has contributed to the...