The State of the Cadastre

It is well written and I do like the items that you address. I do agree with you letter grade for the profession as it exists.
But I do not agree with your premise of the profession. Surveying is the business of supplying information. It is not in the home improvement or customer satisfaction trade or a service industry . It is a blend of legal, scientific,and technical knowledge and skills. There's not one surveyor that all others can be measured from in the figurative sense. One person's mentor is another person's adversary. I could continue but you get point.
I hope you write follow-ups when you get more feedback.

You make a lot of great points, I am glad someone is speaking out. I find it interesting that in the county I live in and the surrounding counties there is typically a County Surveyor, County tax lot mapping, and a County GIS department all within feet of one another and the trees within the county are more accurately mapped than the tax lot lines. All the parts of the puzzle are there and there is no effort to put them together. Thanks for bringing attention to the issue. Jp

Well, the idea that it's surveyors that are responsible for the sad state of GIS info and parcel lines (if that's what we are discussing as the cadastre) seems odd to me.

I gave a very reasonable bid to create the computer parcels for the "new" GIS system waaaaay back in the 80's.

At that time I had quite a bit of the county controlled in state plane (27 but still state plane), the county went with a bid for it being done by someone else in 6 weeks. Of course that didn't happen, it was years later and they were still fighting it.

A real surveyor who does GIS was finally given a contract to improve the mess and he has done a good job, the GIS has been greatly improved but the parcel lines are still messy.

Even after given mountains of data to help the situation much of it never gets imputed. I still can see a GISer locating utilities on the road to the office, I asked what he was doing and he said he was locating features to imput into the city GIS,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
We had given them all that, all of it in state plane, leveled elevations, inverts, everything,,,,,,,,,but I guess it was too much work to use the highly accurate data, easier to just go click on it..........

Anyway, I'm glad to take my lumps regarding the state of the cadaster, but I'm not going to ever want to hear that I didn't give the GIS plenty of chances to improve with data that I gave out for free.

That it isn't used is not my doing.

Maybe it's a regional thing, but here there are townships after townships that can be accurately imputed just using publically available data provided by private land surveyors. That it doesn't get used is not the surveyors fault.

As far as lawyers or landowners writing legals, that is their right............

Again maybe it's regional, as long as I ignore the GIS I don't see the local Cadastre as being in poor shape.

A GIS can be many things. Used properly, it can be a valuable tool. Used improperly by those that don't understand geodetic coordinates, it can create quite a mess. It can contain precise geodetic data but it can also be just a digital picture of somebodies concepts. I am not familiar with that particular product (the cell phone) but used with a understanding of it's limitations, it could be a useful tool. I rather doubt that a cell phone can produce survey grade results when it takes my GNSS base a minimum of 2 hours to collect enough data to be suitable for NGS static processing. The typical cell phone that has GPS navigation features operates from triangulating signals from cell phone towers. It works for driving & plotting power poles & manholes but not exactly survey grade data suitable for property boundaries. I also have serious doubts that the typical cell phone user has a clue what type of data he is receiving or if the coordinates are ground or grid. It is extremely unlikely that he knows the coordinate basis of the points he is looking for or the coordinate basis of the data he is going by. With luck, a metal detector & a shovel, he may find some corners.
The fact that some surveyors also hold engineering licenses is pretty irrelevant. That in no way is a measure of their expertise as a Land Surveyor. The problem with dual registration dates back to the era that most states would issue a Surveyor's license to an engineer based on his engineering degree. That is pretty much a thing of the past as most State Licensing boards have found that practice to be a mistake. There are other factors but they are beyond the scope of this discussion. Some of the best Surveyors I know are dual registered engineers but so are some of the worst. One thing I have found is many surveyors & engineers don't understand the difference between a rectilinear survey and a GPS survey or the difference between grid coordinates & ground coordinates. I was recently involved with a survey of some 28 thousand acres for the State DNR. The guy in charge was dual registered. He thought two people could survey the entire tract, along with numerous out parcels, in a matter of a few weeks using a GPS. Well, this is the Low Country & most of the tract is under water. It is also extremely thick & difficult to access. You have a very narrow window during the Winter for doing anything with a GPS. My concept was to use GPS to establish control & locate everything else with conventional methods. He thought my Tremble robot was out of calibration because the computed distance between GPS grid coordinates differed from measured distances with my robot. He didn't know what a grid factor was or if he did, he didn't know how to apply it. It was "HOWDY DOODY TIME" all over again. I wish him well but I walked & am pleased to be gone.
Trying to establish property boundaries with GIS is a disaster looking for a place to happen. A surveyor has to study the evidence in order to evaluate it. He has to see it in order to make decisions about the credibility of monuments & the evidence. He also has to set monuments & meet the requirements of the law. A GIS can be an asset but it can't do it alone.
Integrating a rectilinear survey with a GPS survey is not a job for a novice. It requires a knowledge of geodetic science, survey coco calculations, geodetic & State Plane coordinates. It also requires a working knowledge of the associated math such as least squares adjustments & spherical geometry. Today's surveyor must be better educated than ever before & he must have a extensive amount of specialized knowledge & training. Many States now require a 4 year BS degree as minimum for registration. Those that claim a 2 year tech degree is enough don't understand the education requirements of today's professional surveyors. I don't see a guy, uneducated in the surveying & mapping professions with a cell phone that collects low quality GPS data, as a threat. Even if he did know what to do with it. A large part of the public doesn't appear to understand what a Land Surveyor does or the value of his services but I believe that over time, his knowledge will become more & more in demand.

MightyMoe, post: 379259, member: 700 wrote:

I gave a very reasonable bid to create the computer parcels for the "new" GIS system waaaaay back in the 80's....

Again maybe it's regional, as long as I ignore the GIS I don't see the local Cadastre as being in poor shape.

That must have been the very late 80s or did you mean 90s.
Not much government GIS at the time. URISA was just forming out of Harvard.
Parcel mapping was way down at the end of the user application. Mostly emergency planning, tax assessment and utility/infrastructure mapping. There were no large format scanners except one made by Kurzweil for a few hundred thousand dollars. They sold more music synthesizers.

In the 90s, GIS got rolling along. Some cities and parishes earnestly tried to get it right with planned base mapping with associative surveying. BUT some got it all wrong. They went to low bid process and got skrewed big time. Either by out of state firms trying to break into the market or there was a engineer originally from the subcontinent who was going to have the data processed by some associates in the subcontinent. That's what my parish did and they had no idea of the mess they created and how it still has an effect on everything.

Robert Hill, post: 379445, member: 378 wrote: That must have been the very late 80s or did you mean 90s.
Not much government GIS at the time. URISA was just forming out of Harvard.
Parcel mapping was way down at the end of the user application. Mostly emergency planning, tax assessment and utility/infrastructure mapping. There were no large format scanners except one made by Kurzweil for a few hundred thousand dollars. They sold more music synthesizers.

In the 90s, GIS got rolling along. Some cities and parishes earnestly tried to get it right with planned base mapping with associative surveying. BUT some got it all wrong. They went to low bid process and got skrewed big time. Either by out of state firms trying to break into the market or there was a engineer originally from the subcontinent who was going to have the data processed by some associates in the subcontinent. That's what my parish did and they had no idea of the mess they created and how it still has an effect on everything.

Late 80's, by 91 I was trying to incorporate deeds they had pulled for the GIS project into a new county wide water system. I finally gave up on using their files and just would pull deeds myself.

They had given up on outsourcing the work and had people in-house, but since it was put in using some "interesting" processes it became pretty much not usable for me and like you it's still messy in many areas with those "original" GIS lines.
Now where the Earthpoint or PLS lines came from,,,,,,,,I'm not sure.

Where they have new subdivisions it's great, it will be a looongggg time till the whole county is fixed up,,,,,,

Problem is,,,,,,,,,it's lots of work, not all that easy to get it right and it costs real money, even when they get donations (free data-I've given lots of those myself). And when the "donations" never show up, that is frustrating.

A GIS is only as accurate as the least qualified technician entering data into to it. A precise GIS is something to strive for but accuracy in regards to boundaries would remain elusive. It might also further the drift from boundary being primarily legal to boundary being a strive for mathematical perfection. North Carolina is a good example of the latter. Grid ties are mandatory and much of the rules established by the Board makes it easy for a PLS to call himself a good surveyor simply because he marks off NC's checklist by producing a plat with a north arrow, grid tie, legend, and a bunch of standard plat info. These good intended rules naturally pull surveyors away from searching for intent and push them towards simple location. I am now in Maine where PLSs are allowed to actually serve their clients due to this wise rule:
[INDENT=1]The licensee and client may agree, in writing, to except any of the technical standards established by Part 2 of this chapter, other than the written confirmation required by Part 2, section 3 below. The nature and extent of any such exceptions must be noted on the face of the plan or other work product." [/INDENT]
As finding intent is much more difficult than obtaining precise Grid coordinates, I am against any push for a national cadastre even though I know it would help me in the short term. I would rather see a push to give every surveyor the ability to make a contract specifically for the client he is working for even if the client foolishly chooses not to monument corners or have a report of survey. If we have no control over how we survey then we are simply administrators under the guise of a profession. We should not continue to force our clients to pay for data that non paying parties utilize for lucrative decision making.

I apologize for my tenancy to ramble & be overly wordy. I will try to put it in a "nut shell". In it's simplest form, a GIS is just something plotted on a digital picture or map. It is really no different than a paper plan except that it can have many more layers & contain much more information. It obviously can be very useful for planners & decision makers & those that prepare reports on various subjects. I would compare it to a tax map. They are usually pretty good at showing you what a parcel looks like & where it is within it's limitations, mostly graphically. It is not a survey and can not establish property corners that meet the requirements of the law governing property boundaries. I recently got a message from a guy on another site that offered me a lot of money if I could help him create a GIS to do property boundaries for mortgage companies. I told him, thanks but no thanks. Most people that use & prepare a GIS lack an understanding of geodesy or a knowledge of "Evidence & Procedure for Boundary Control". Ever ask one of them what coordinate system they are using or what the positional tolerance of their data is? I tie all boundary surveys of any size to State Plane coordinates. Anybody that uses GPS & works with geodetic coordinates knows that a GPS survey is not the same as a rectilinear survey done with a total station. They know about the difference between ground coordinates & grid coordinates & how to apply the mapping angle & how to interpret post processed GPS data. Do you think somebody running around looking for points with a cell phone knows that or has the knowledge of what kind of errors are involved in GPS positions?