.

Geoinformatics_06-2009
interview less making an effort to bring younger generations into the industry, which also highlights the need to improve our performance with respect to sustainable development objectives. in 2006 and 2007, by pursuing our openness initiatives and an active communication policy directed at students in engineering schools, the order managed once again to reverse the recent trend in the number of incoming practitioners with respect to the number of retirees; however, this upturn and perceptible increase in incoming recruits should not eclipse the recruitment and replacement difficulties our profession will have to face, which reflect demographic changes in the french population and the retirement of post-wwii baby boomers. these difficulties are also the result of the elimination in the 1990s of the diploma issued by the institute of topography at the conservatoire national des arts et metiers, which was once a preferred path to the dplg exam, in terms of the professional experience and networking opportunities it afforded its alumni. consequently, we can anticipate that 2013 will bring the retirement of nearly 10% of the professionals in our field! it is therefore very important to attract students to the field in order to ensure a sufficient applicant pool by opening and updating the requirements for becoming a licensed surveyor. the revision of the dplg exam is part of this effort to ensure a steady stream of incoming recruits to the industry. our outreach efforts with engineering schools were also supplemented with an awareness campaign brought to high school and secondary school students. indeed, the industry wishes to recruit an increasing number of technical students, in light of the need not only to replace retiring surveyors, but also to attract staff qualified to fill other roles at surveyor firms. q: what are the main technologies at the surveyors' disposal today and how strong is the profession's ability to adapt to them, use them, and foster innovation to meet its own and the consumers' requirements? a: with the advent in the 1980s of land databases and geographic information systems, as well as gps and 3d digital plan and model production, particularly in the construction industry, and with the invention of scanners and digital models, land surveyors have always managed to adapt to new measurement and mapping technologies, and firms were quick to adopt cad technology. it is likely that technological developments will level off following the period of rapid growth experienced from the 1980s to the 2000s, and instead we may see developments that enhance existing technologies. these would include complete stations with integrated gps or satellite acquisition and topographical survey technologies that will be very useful in dense urban environments due to the 3d airborne laser scanning telemeters that are now being released on the market, revolutionizing existing work methods. we will also see a decline in the trend of transferring tasks from machines to human expertise with the development of man-machine interfaces that are increasingly interactive and competitive and that enable users to control data quality, provide them with a failsafe, and allow them to test and verify the reliability of the results obtained to prevent errors. this dynamic will raise questions regarding the line between new technology and human expertise in the field of land measurement. as for how well new measurement, acquisition and data production technology will perform and the trivialization that may result ("push-button" technique), surveyors will have to adapt their expert and professional roles to the task of analyzing, interpreting, promoting, verifying and certifying the quality of the data and objects measured, even if it does mean using information produced by a geographic information system. the teria real-time gps positioning network, which achieves centimeter accuracy, will help simplify the method of acquiring topographical and land data and thus become a means of leverage and a special tool for surveyors, who will then be free to refocus on their core business while offering added value in terms of defining geographic objects, performing land measurement expert assessments and determining the legal lines of demarcation between two properties. nevertheless, the increasing efficiency of land measurement makes it necessary to have competent, highly-qualified personnel "behind" the increasingly sophisticated devices, who can go beyond the "push-button" technique. teria now makes it easier for surveyors to deploy one less operator to the field (and eliminates a third of the cost of a full team), since they can work with a single mobile receiver instead of two, one of which is used to serve as a pivot. this adaptation to new technologies goes hand-in-hand with significant support in terms of training, particularly for employees of surveyor firms. such adaptations also go hand-in-hand with the modernization of public service delegations for surveyors, which has led to a project to create an electronic land register portal for environmental data, as defined in the sustainable development and land use char- ter signed in september 2008 between the order of licensed surveyors and the french ministry for ecology, energy, sustainable development and land use (meeddat). the purpose of this portal is to promote the sharing of land data and occupancy rights with the data in the industry managed by various partner entities, in a unified land register known as the "rfu" (referentiel foncier unifie). q: the surveying profession has outgrown its purely technical aspects long ago and today it includes a strong legal aspect with knowledge of the law playing a key role in defending, protecting and managing properties, and in contributing to sustainable development. what do you see are the future challenges for the surveying profession in this regard, especially the harmonisation of differing professional practices in tomorrow's europe? a: as stated above, we are moving toward the production of accurate, guaranteed, intelligent 3d land data, for which the licensed surveyor will be the highly valued 4th legal dimension. indeed, surveyors are measurement technicians, but are increasingly also legal technicians. this necessary understanding of the law is apparent in several areas. first of all, jobs involving property demarcations, land preservation, divisions of space, court expert missions, land management, or the definition of rights associated with properties, whether they are developed or undeveloped, individual residences or jointlyowned, that comprise a surveyor s core business and for which the french government has entrusted the order with public service delegations, require in-depth knowledge of the law, from the civil code to laws governing the roads, local governments, government-owned property and expropriation. it is also important to remember that by virtue of section 8 of the law of 7th may 1946 instituting the order of licensed surveyors, surveyors are qualified to fill the role of arbitrator and give legal consultations. a surveyor s work pertaining to agricultural and environmental land use requires perfect knowledge of rural law. likewise, urban planning law is one of the branches of the law that has changed the most in recent decades and has become alarmingly complex both in terms of city planning and urban land use, as acknowledged by all those who work with it. this makes it necessary for surveyors, who are now widely recognized as playing an indispensable role in urban planning, to constantly update their knowledge of this field. september 2009 46
Powered by fluidbook tm