Big data and what the land surveyor can do about it.

In 1996 I had a buddy who was a photographer want to take some digital pictures of my Buell S1 motorcycle using his handy dandy new digital camera to gain product advertising pictures.  The camera and equipment needed consumed the entire space of his station wagon.  He set up the camera and used Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis as the backdrop.  The 640x480 digital camera would require several minutes for each shot.  Lake Calhoun at any given summer day has thousands of walkers, runners, and bikers, all passing by the shot.  I asked:  won’t the action destroy the pictures?  He believed any motion would not be captured in the long time it took to register each image.  Turns out he was wrong, and every image came out as a complete blur when he got back to the office to process the data.  A 640x480 image is less than 1/3^rd of a megapixel, whereas an I-Phone 10 is 12 megapixels or 39X the resolution of that professional camera in 1996.

In 1996, we were selling Hewlett Packard Unix Workstations to surveyors using SiteComp Unix software.  The software was delivered on a single 3 ½” floppy disk that could hold 1.44 megabytes after compression!  A single 1.44 megabyte floppy could hold hundreds of SiteComp job files as calculations and drawings were the same data structures taking a fraction of the disc space of CAD with a lot more usable data.  At the time a HP 9000 series 712/60 (at $3,995.00 the lowest cost Unix workstation) was typically configured with 128MB internal memory and typically a 512MB internal hard drive, enough to store surveying and engineering work for decades.

In the past quarter century, much has changed with those writing software losing control of efficiency of data.  Just because you can save millions of points on that 20 acre site dos not mean progress, in fact quite the opposite.  While not enough data is certainly a bad thing, like the picture quality of a 640x480 camera, there comes a point where too much data is simply too much. 

A decade after my Buell was being photographed, in 2006 I purchased a Sony HDR-SR1 Handycam – the first High Definition hand held camera.  The software to edit its high definition AVCHD format came out nearly 2 years later, and even then pretty much overloaded my high powered office desktops to edit the high definition video.  A decade later (today), desktops have the power to edit high definition, yet the 4K resolution has still not been made mainstream simply because too much data is still a problem, whereas 1080p (1920X1080) is more main stream – still.

Land Surveyors who used to replicate an exact topo on 20 acres with 100 points surveyed on the ground can now have a less accurate LiDAR topo with 220,000 points taken every 2 feet but misses edges of pavement, top and bottom of curbs, and other details critical to those designing with the data.  Those using LiDAR’s 220,000 points for engineering and earthwork will slow down every step of the way compared to the 100 precision point DTM from the land surveyor.

The general public as well as builders and developers (and many professionals) think they can go to BestBuy and get a drone to obtain a topo instead of paying a surveyor – i.e. you.    Unedited drone data overloads the computer and often a terrible representation of the actual contour of the land. 

Software developers who think point clouds are a step forward, so why not fill up that data, are simply wrong. 

Land Survey data is used to convey ownership, define new ownerships, define the natural ground surface for engineers to design from, and stakeout what’s been newly designed.  This has not changed for many hundreds of years.  A step forward is to create all that is needed with less – not more – data and have computers do what they do best – compute. 

Today’s LandMentor software cannot be delivered on a 1.44 megabyte floppy, but like SiteComp Unix, is but a single code just under half a terabyte.  The data structures are pure math, instantly replicating exact coordinate geometry, replicating the land surface, and building all of the parcel data from land surveying based coordinate geometry.  The same coordinate geometry that builds the drawing in both 2D and interactive 3D.  No need for a point cloud or data basing anything… back to the basics the land surveying industry has always been based upon.

When it comes to the future of land surveying we really do need to embrace the past if the industry is to have a future.