Survey land or bodies of water to measure or determine features
Most of the output can be produced by software today.
Software can pull the data, run the comparison and write up what it found. The accuracy depends almost entirely on whether it is wired into the real system of record rather than a stale copy, which is the problem the tools and auth layer exists to solve.
| How automatable | Mostly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Analysis and evaluation work |
| Jobs that do it | 9 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Builders, Tools and auth |
| O*NET activity | Estimating the Quantifiable Characteristics of Products, Events, or Information (4.A.1.b.3) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 9 occupations that perform it.
- Collect information about specific features of the Earth, using aerial photography and other digital remote sensing techniques.
- Record the results of surveys, including the shape, contour, location, elevation, and dimensions of land or land features.
- Determine orientation of tracts of land, including position, boundaries, size, and shape, using theodolites, electronic distance-measuring equipment, satellite-based positioning equipment, land information systems, or other geodetic survey equipment.
- Direct or participate in surveying to lay out installations or establish reference points, grades, or elevations to guide construction.
- Conduct field surveys or study maps, graphs, diagrams, or other data to identify and correct power system problems.
- Supervise or conduct field surveys, inspections, or technical investigations to obtain data required to revise construction drawings.
- Plan and conduct field surveys to locate new sites and analyze details of project sites.
- Position and hold the vertical rods, or targets, that theodolite operators use for sighting to measure angles, distances, and elevations.
- Perform offshore oil or gas exploration or extraction duties, such as conducting underwater surveys or repairing and maintaining drilling rigs or platforms.
- Travel over photographed areas to observe, identify, record, and verify all relevant features.
- Plan and conduct ground surveys designed to establish baselines, elevations, and other geodetic measurements.
- Conduct surveys to determine exact positions, measurement of points, elevations, lines, areas, volumes, contours, or other features of land surfaces.
- Conduct surveys to ascertain the locations of natural features and man-made structures on the Earth's surface, underground, and underwater, using electronic distance-measuring equipment, such as GPS, and other surveying instruments.
- Survey bodies of water to determine navigable channels and to secure data for construction of breakwaters, piers, and other marine structures.
- Record survey measurements or descriptive data, using notes, drawings, sketches, or inked tracings.
- Locate and mark sites selected for geophysical prospecting activities, such as efforts to locate petroleum or other mineral products.
- Set out and recover stakes, marks, or other monumentation.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for analysis and evaluation work, and what it costs.
Start in the assistant with an export of the real data, because the accuracy problem here is a stale copy rather than a weak model. Make, at $9 a month, is the cheapest way to put the pull on a schedule once the analysis is worth repeating.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
9 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Assess characteristics of land or property”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.