In a high dollar area ($15m homes) my PC spent way too much time trying to explain to the two landowners that:
No there isn't a big gap between their common line.
No, the property line doesn't cross back and forth across the river, the river is the boundary.
No, the land isn't 31 AC. it's 35.8 just like the deed calls for.
All this bad info from crappy GIS.
I was on a nearby counties GIS and when the property lines are turned on, the photo vanishes. How I wish they were all like that. This is the second one I've seen that does it, hopefully it's a trend, I'm pushing for the local ones to do the same.
OnX has been an awesome survey job generating program!
I've always thought that showing points and lines shaded in the manner of s-orbital probability electron clouds would indicate where such features would likely
be in the absence of verifiable accuracy.
OnX has been an awesome survey job generating program!
We got a nasty job recently cause of how OnX was being used for hunting. It included bullets hitting houses with people in them. The owners complained to the authorities about trespass. The authorities told them, that there is no trespass since the "official" maps (GIS) shows the land in question being public. The task was to get the GIS to change to the real boundaries, then get OnX to change so hunting would be regulated. People use this OnX thing like it's authoritative.
Is it ironic or hypocritical for a PLS that doesn't pin or tie their client's parcel to Earth to complain about the inaccuracy of GIS based tax maps (this is not directed at any individual poster)?
@murphy I think the problem is with the google earth overlay more than anything because who knows how google is manipulating their images. I think that's why moe was saying the picture vanishing when parcel lines are turned on is good.
@murphy I think the problem is with the google earth overlay more than anything because who knows how google is manipulating their images. I think that's why moe was saying the picture vanishing when parcel lines are turned on is good.
I'll have to say yes and no, the photos have become much better, the parcel lines have become worse.
The 1980's parcel lines were positionally better than the 2025 ones for much of my home county and city. Same with sectional lines, and the disaster that's state parcel lines is something to behold.
As far as pinning them to the earth, we exclusively were doing that back to the late 1970's. Even to the point of developing parcel lines in state plane for the city/county mappers. Unfortunately, they "updated" their GIS and now the parcel lines I gave them have been erased with new ones, much farther off than the old ones. It was a bit discouraging to see big areas of the city property lines shift from being centered on the streets, running along the back of walk, fitting the fence lines to now slicing through houses, a dozen feet off center from streets ect.
But I will say that the ownership info has improved as far as who owns the land.
Is it ironic or hypocritical for a PLS that doesn't pin or tie their client's parcel to Earth to complain about the inaccuracy of GIS based tax maps
The PLS is hired and paid by the landowner to determine boundaries, not to populate the government's GIS system.
Our competition for work is not always just the other surveyor. It is very often the option of not doing the survey at all. As complexities rise, so do costs. The perfect becomes the enemy of the good.
Our competition for work is not always just the other surveyor. It is very often the option of not doing the survey at all. As complexities rise, so do costs. The perfect becomes the enemy of the good.
You won't hear me complaining about any landowners who decide to settle their dispute for free.
You won't hear me complaining about any landowners who decide to settle their dispute for free.
True, as long as you have plenty of other work to do.
@mightymoe The problem on the GIS side now is they have rubber sheeted the boundary information because lack of understanding the datum’s and projections ESRI had a gap in time they could not handle. They have two choices if and when the new datum is put in. Rubber sheet all the old data and have the same issue or rely on the surveyors to give them the correct data so it is right. I see the same thing you do the lines from county to county some are ok some are not close. The surveyor also has caused some of this. By not providing the meta data of which the state plane was scaled from . Then some GIS people don’t know how to correctly apply that meta data when it’s there either. So they rubber sheeted everything which is a mess. Holding imagery over observations . A cluster lol.
The problem on the GIS side now is they have rubber sheeted the boundary information because lack of understanding the datum’s and projections ESRI had a gap in time they could not handle.
I don't think understanding datums and projections is gonna help when they're trying to mix and match record data to the nearest 0.5' from 150 years with contemporary data to the nearest 0.01'. Eventually those mathematical discrepancies will make a mess of things no matter how well stitched together the ortho imagery is.
Doesn't help when you are willfully blind and deliberately use an over-simplified earth model from the get-go - Google we're looking at you...
I don't see this as a GIS problem. GIS is simply a method of displaying and attributing spatial information (Not too much unlike CAD). The problem is that people are purposely doing shoddy work or don't understand what they are doing. I live in an area where our property mappers (County GIS) use the deeds and plats to COGO in the boundaries. Ergo, the better the product that the surveyors produce, the better the GIS. I've seen the Surveyor vs. GIS saga play out for 30 years. If we build GIS layers using accurately collected spatial information .... Win/Win situation.
We already know that the old hand drawn maps the city/county created will underlay better in Cad when scanned and aligned than the GIS lines. It's quite an eye-opener. Same with many old plats.
The PLS is hired and paid by the landowner to determine boundaries, not to populate the government's GIS system.
As a PLS who strongly objects to the mandatory recording of retracement surveys, I would agree but only if the intent of pinning parcels to Earth was solely for tax map purposes. I don't like mandates, so I wouldn't push our Boards to make a rule that we must always tie things to Earth, I've just seen many instances where that data became invaluable. For instance, there were massive landslides and erosion when Hurricane Helene ripped through the NC mountains. Relative accuracy of effected boundaries were useless.
Doesn't it just seem weird that we celebrate Mason and Dixon for running the first line of longitude in America and we tip our hats at the PLSS surveyors who got true north right, but the typical PLS can't be bothered to copy and paste a coordinate pair on even a single boundary monument?
Thank God for Surveyors is my comment here on GIS.
s far as pinning them to the earth, we exclusively were doing that back to the late 1970's. Even to the point of developing parcel lines in state plane for the city/county mappers. Unfortunately, they "updated" their GIS and now the parcel lines I gave them have been erased with new ones, much farther off than the old ones. It was a bit discouraging to see big areas of the city property lines shift from being centered on the streets, running along the back of walk, fitting the fence lines to now slicing through houses, a dozen feet off center from streets ect.
But I will say that the ownership info has improved as far as who owns the land.
Keep your counties GIS feet to the fire is what I say....
Assuming this is "GIS" accessed via ESRI web application, Web services or Web maps....A
The easiest thing, and what many "GIS" folks are best at are attributes - Moe is smack on. The ownership info is good, but the geometry sucks. This is because most GIS have strengths in tieing to databases (text/numbers) but are remaining ignorant on coordinate systems, and the excellent shifters that are available in ESRI and a weakness in using proper rubbersheeting that is common in TBC (my forte) and other programs. We see this over and over again the publishing of survey data from PRO being mishandled during the publishing of web information assuming WGS84(G.xxx) = NAD83(2011).
If as Moe states that old surveys (scanned?) or coordinates displayed are lining up better in CAD, then it is the GIS operator's skill in ESRI or surveying software (TBC) that is lacking. However as OleManRiver notes that there is lack of scale information, the GISer has little recourse except to get their ass from behind the monitor and at least try a GNSS survey (long static) on two points identified on the sheet. Don't get me wrong, this isn't "fixing boundaries", but is far, far better than a GISer using imagery with lousy metadata to call things good. Don't get me started, but some blame must be placed on creators of remotely sensed imagery (DRONES, SFM, Satellite) who simply tag the data "NAD83". Are you kidding me? There isn't a contractor out there that is fixing GNSS derived data fixing the coordinates to NAD83(1986). Lordy, please tag the data NAD83 (2011) epoch 2010. When that is done, GISers are not fumbling with two transformations resulting in double shifting (when the data was in 2011 to begin with).