Surveyors collect geographic data, GIS solutions use geographic data. Surveyors use precise instruments, procedures, and computations to accurately locate and define geographic features while conducting field surveys that range from cadastral to engineering construction layout. Engineers design and build structures and infrastructures on geography measured by surveyors. The expansion of GIS technology has led to the development of new tools created specifically for surveyors and engineers. A GIS provides tools that will help you integrate a variety of data sources and types, maintain and manage inventories, visualize data and related information using dynamic maps, make decisions about resource management, and perform modeling and analysis.
Surveyed data is organized by project, by surveyor, by date, by quality, by type, and by location.
A GIS is a natural organizer and analyzer of this information. Bringing this data into a GIS provides for a spatial organization around survey data. This technology is ideally suited as the framework necessary for implementing the spatial component of a surveys information system to store, access, and retrieve surveys and survey control information. GIS tools for surveyors enable them to become valuable players in the GIS process. More and more surveyors will become increasingly involved in the process of creating new GIS layers as well as improving the spatial quality of existing layers and GIS solutions.