PLSO The Oregon Surveyor Sept/Oct 2019

Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org 5 From the PLSO Chairman essential for services such as ours that provide the firewall needed to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public when it comes to property boundaries and landowner rights. If that isn’t enough, a recent article in the July/August edition of the American Sur- veyor magazine by Robert W. Foster, past president of the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG), alerts us to even more cause for concern. A FIG Commission 3 report delves into whether crowdsourc- ing and VGI (volunteered geographic information) can be utilized “as an appli- cation of benefit to surveying” whereas volunteers go out and gather geospatial data with the intent to capture “author- itative” spatial data “in order to achieve goals whether by ‘saving money,’ saving time,’ or ‘saving lives’” for applications including transportation mapping and hydrographic mapping. This information would purportedly be “for the benefit of a surveyor/mapper” but how would the quality or origin of the data be verified? Unknown is if the “crowd” is a collection of amateur volunteers who possess “au- thoritative” knowledge of the data being collected or not. Sound familiar? How many of you have had a project where a rudimentary prelimi- nary map was submitted and approved for a property line adjustment or partition by a layperson only to find when you go out to survey it that min- imum lot areas or setbacks can’t be met or there are encroachments tha t can ’ t be resolved? Where the rub- ber really hits the road f or us is when it is suggested that crowdsourcing & VGI can also be utilized for the “compilation of draft cadastral maps for the adjudication of parcels and property owners and for other land man- agement and administrative purposes…” The report questions whether surveyors are “willing to be pragmatic rather than stick strictly to historic methods and high levels of accuracy” depending on “market economies” because a few geographical errors in positioning of properties has “virtually no impact on the functioning of the property market”? Say what…! We may become extinct dinosaurs sooner than we thought. While the FIG report is basically informa- tional and intelligently presents the pros and cons of the crowdsourcing/VGI gath- ering of information and whether it may be practical, beneficial or not, it also high- lights deficiencies in methodology where professional surveyors may not be able to trust or verify information that they are being asked to certify for the sake of project time/cost savings. The article does take note in a couple places that American surveyors are accustomed “to taking full professional responsibility” for our data and mapping which indicates that other member countries in FIG may have dif- fering standards than we do in the U.S. The majority of the uses proposed for crowdsourcing/VGI information are what we would typically associate with GISmap- ping levels of accuracy, but the door is being cracked wider and wider into our licensed professional domain and we need to continue to be vigilant and take action when necessary. On a final note, I’d like to congratulate Tim Fassbender on his appointment to the OSBEELS Board by the governor’s office to fill one of the Land Surveyor vacancies that has been open for much too long. We have a couple candidates that have expressed interest to fill the current vacancy but no one at this time that I know of has officially submitted an application. The OSBEELS Board con- sists of 11 members; five representing engineers, two land surveyors, a dual licensed engineer/surveyor, a photogram- metrist and two members of the public. Because land surveyors are a minori- ty on the Board, it’s essential for us to have all vacancies filled for better representation of our profession. I’d like to thank our lobbyist Darrell Fuller, whose assistance with the governor’s office and OSBEELS helped with this ef- fort. Any qualified candidates for the vacant position are welcome to contact the PLSO Board if you need assistance or have any ques- tions about the process. x