After attending a two day commercial for ArcGIS I'm wondering if there is a national surveyors event to attend anymore. Calling this a survey summit was false advertising unless GIS is the summit of surveying. I won't make this mistake again. The homeless have adversely possessed the green areas on the bay front. If I were a GIS geek I probably would have felt at home among the 15000 like minded registrants. I'm sure Arc GIS is a fine product but not what I came for.
Thanks for warning us. GIS is a great tool, but it's not surveying.
They really do promote the Summit. Nice to know how much hype there is in their pitch.
Gis just makes our lives miserably. I'm tired of neighbors saying the GIS said. It's a great tool for utilities, but useless to boundaries (real boundaries). I can see the use to cities, counties, and state for taxes and basic location.
I go to manifold.net when it comes to GIS. For $300,
it seens like it does all and more than ARC INFO which
costs several thousand bucks.
It is not COGO, but manifold has export and imports to
CAD, GIS, imagery, and more.
> Gis just makes our lives miserably. I'm tired of neighbors saying the GIS said. It's a great tool for utilities, but useless to boundaries (real boundaries). I can see the use to cities, counties, and state for taxes and basic location.
GIS makes my life wonderful. Just like any tool, when used properly it works well and GIS is a great tool for cataloging and inventory of monuments. We use it daily for a variety of survey related items, but definitlely NOT boundary. It's more of an informative tool and for that it's fabulous.
Pretty much every city and county we now work in has some sort of GIS deliverable required for our survey products from as-builts, to plats to construction plans. GIS is growing and us Surveyor's need to get on the bandwagon.
As you pointed out, the danger comes with the mis-use and misrepresentation of boundary lines on GIS maps. As with anything, ignorance is bliss. We've actully got several surveys because the owner notice their property line looked to close to the neighbor's house. We let them know up front that the information is not accurate but they wouldn't hear it and wanted a survey. I think they are still in the county GIS department working things out. :-$
:good:
Good Post.
GIS is a graphical database.
Nothing more.
This post was not made to trash GIS. I saw some awesome things GIS does. Just don't advertise it as a survey seminar when for all but one session it's not.