Enhancing surveying education through e-learning
Liza Groenendijk & Bela Markus
FIG Publication No 46.
Surveying is one of the oldest professions. Traditionally land surveyors are professionals who determine or establish points, lines, polygons of the selected real word objects, who collect their attribute data, who register the rights on those and visualize the results. To fulfil the needs of the society usually surveying schools were one of the first higher educational institutions in the field of engineering in every country. On the one hand, to process raw measurements a very high level of mathematical background was needed. That is why so many mathematicians are in close contacts with surveying. On the other hand data processing needed special devices like the abacus, the logarithmic table, the mechanical calculator etc. At the middle of the last century a new device was introduced: the computer. It changed dramatically first our computational habits in sixties, and afterwards the mapping devices and the data processing practice as a whole new way of thinking. In the seventies the remote sensing satellites and in the eighties the Global Positioning System (GPS) generated more basic changes. The introduction of Internet and the rapid changes of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) caused yet another fundamental transformation of surveying. Nowadays the computers are used only for a very little percentage for computing. They are totally integrated into our workflow, serving us within data acquisition, database developments, data processing, data analysis and visualization. Through the computer networks our profession serves the e-Society.
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