Keynote Speakers Announced for 2021 Survey & GIS Summit

Wednesday, November 3: Dr. Jan Van Sickle, PhD, PLS

We are in this together. Let’s not waste any time debating who is in the catbird seat. Both surveyors and GIS professionals have plenty of mountains to climb.  We’ll get to the top a helluva lot faster if we stop arguing about who’s leading. Our software, our tools, even the scope of our work is expanding so fast all of us need to focus on learning as much possible, as quickly as possible. The sophistication of this stuff is mind-boggling. Dynamic reference frames and epochs, DevOps, SLAM, UAS data, Mobile Mapping, NATRF just to mention a few. We can contribute to all of them, but we first need to know more about them than we do, a lot more. As the Red Queen said in Alice in Wonderland, “. . . it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” So, let’s help each other do that because we are in this together.

With many years of experience, Dr. Jan Van Sickle advised global companies (Anadarko, IHS Energy, Microsoft, Jeppesen, Maxar, and many more) on geospatial matters. He has created and led departments, managed the creation of new programs, and developed systems used around the globe after earning his Ph.D. in geospatial engineering from the University of Colorado and is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State University and Lecturer at the University of Colorado in Denver.

Thursday, November 4: Nancy von Meyer, PLS, GISP, PE, PhD

Nancy von Meyer, PLS, GISP, PE, PhD

GIS is a Common Language: Measurement and evidence have been the domain of the Land Surveyor since its earliest days. Land surveyors establish or recover on the ground physical evidence of title and ownership. Parcel mapping is a compilation and aggregation that serves as an index to other information. GIS serves both efforts. It can be used to support field collection of measurements, reduce and compile measurements, and apply analysis such as least squares analysis to estimate the quality of measurements and control. GIS is also vital to parcel mapping. It provides the workflows and tools to extract from and link to record information and compile and aggregate record information into a single view. GIS is the common ground. It is automated geography that provides a common language to bridge the gap between parcel-by-parcel evidence-based land surveys and jurisdiction-wide parcel mapping. Rather than carving out separate roles or setting up barriers to use, land surveyors and parcel mappers need to leverage the common language of geography, as expressed in GIS, to improve the quality and efficiency of both.

We will explore some ways land surveyors and parcel mappers, as well as other allied professions, can increase cooperation to achieve more efficiency and greater accuracy.

Nancy von Meyer is president of Fairview Industries, Inc., specializing in land records information systems and developing sustainable partnerships and collaborations for shared data stewardship. Dr. von Meyer is a nationally recognized leader in land records and use of cadastral information for decision support. She has been at Fairview Industries since 1983 and has over 40 years of GIS system design and implementation experience. Her efforts have been applied in the areas of land records system design and implementation including boundaries, survey systems, parcel mapping, and federal records.