2010 ESRI Survey and Engineering GIS Summit Happenings

July 13, 2010 By: Eric Gakstatter

I attended the 2010 ESRI Surveying and Engineering GIS Summit (SEGS) last weekend in San Diego. Actually, I'm still in San Diego because the ESRI International User Conference follows as it does every year.

Brent Jones, ESRI Global Marketing Manager for Survey/Cadastre/Engineering, kicked off the event. In attendance were about 250 land surveyors, engineers and GIS professionals. Next year, as announced on Sunday, ACSM announced it will combine its annual conference with the SEGS to be held the first week on July. ACSM and ESRI signed a three-year agreement to combined the two conferences. As I've written before, conference consolidation is a great idea. The drawback is that ESRI competitors such as Autodesk, Intergraph, and others aren't welcome. The combined ACSM/ESRI SEGS conference is expected to attract 1,200 attendees.

According to Brent, this years attendance breaks out as follow:

49% are from land surveying
30% are from GIS
12% are from engineering
9% are others
More than 20 countries are represented.
There are 20 geodesists in attendance.

Brent presented some other thought-provoking numbers.

40%-60% of engineering time is spent locating and validating information.
90% of each DOT's (Department of Transportation) activities is geospatial-related.
30% of a person's time is spent looking for relevant information.
Effective data management can save O&M costs up to 14%.

Brent's numbers agree with what I've been writing about for quite awhile. There great opportunities in data management and data analysis.

A welcoming video from Jack Dangermond, Founder and President of ESRI, was played. In it, he apologized to Ronnie Taylor, NGS, about his comments a decade+ ago about how accuracy wasn't important for GIS. It was sort of tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless, it says something that he would address the 250-person attended conference when he's got a 13,000+ User Conference to attend to.

Jack Dangermond, ESRI President

Keynote speaker Nancy von Meyer discussed crowd-sourced or third-party sourced data relative to a national land parcel database, but it applies in general as crowd-sourced and third-party-sourced data proliferates. Among other issues, introduced (at least to me) a term called "shadow data." Nancy's definition of shadow data, and I hope I get this right, is data that is published from a trusted source that was derived from a non-authoritative source. In other words, Joe Surveyor finds parcel data from the Internet, incorporates it into his plat, and publishes it with no notation about its original source. It's assumed to be original/authentic data.

With regards to the surveying profession, Nancy admits "we are in a minority position."

Recognize it, own it, solve it is her mantra.

Keynote Dr. Nancy von Meyer, PE, RLS, GISP

Lawrie Jordan, founder of ERDAS of which he sold to Leica and now Director of Imagery at ESRI, spoke about this being the most exciting time of his 40 year career in imagery.

He stated that in less than five years, every square inch of the Earth will be imaged (by satellites) constantly. He said we are already half-way there.

Jordan stated that the problem with imagery has shifted from availability to accessibility and management.

On the horizon, he said, is the transformation from using imagery as a backdrop to extracting information from it.

Stuart Rich, Chief Technology Officer of Penobscot Bay Media, LLC, presented on understanding, documenting, and building systems to support spatial data infrastructure’s security requirements as well as initiatives to move GIS inside the building footprint. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by his presentation.

He is involved in using terrestrial LiDAR inside buildings to collect massive amounts of data. So much, in fact, that "the value of measurement is trending very close to zero" using very high-volume data collection at 250,000 points/second.

Stuart's Factoid: Only 16% of cities are mapped with a big vacuum being building interior maps in urban areas.

He discussed the lack of attention on underground infrastructure mapping.

On Sunday, I made a keynote presentation during lunch with the title of Get It Surveyed (GIS). I presented three concepts (theses):

A GIS isn't driven by spatial accuracy.
GNSS technology in the next 10 years is going to advance significantly faster than the past 10 years.
The land surveyor’s role in the next 10 years is going to change significantly more than the past 10 years.

If you're interested in viewing my powerpoint presentation, you can download it here.

In the Q&A after the presentation, I was asked what I thought about licensure for GIS professionals. I sort of fell on my face answering that one. I'm preparing a better answer with some input from other folks.

After lunch, there was a lightly-attended but good panel discussion called the Land Surveying and GIS Panel Discussion moderated by the California Land Surveyors Association. Jerry Miller, PLS, agreed my answer about licensure for GIS professional wasn't valid. He agreed that there shouldn't be a licensure requirement. I like his argument and will probably solicit his opinion when I write about it.

I had a short discussion with Bill Henning, NGS RTK Network specialist, about the continuing debate of whether single baseline (base/rover config) RTK vertical is better than vertical accuracy obtained by network RTK. I still haven't seen any empirical data on this. The Survey Association in the UK wrote me. Remember them? They published an extensive report on Network RTK I've referred to a few times. They told me they are updating the report. It will be interesting to see if they do a single base comparison to Network RTK.

The tradeshow booth area was light. A couple of notables:

Javad premiered their new Triumph V.S. GNSS surveying system. You can always count on Javad for innovation and creativity.