Home / Uncategorized / Young Surveyors Building the Capacity & Facing the Challenges

Young Surveyors Building the Capacity & Facing the Challenges

| April 13, 2010
Spatial Data forum logo

The International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) congress rolls into town this week (Sydney April 11-16) and from all the hype surrounding this congress it will no doubt be well received and a great learning opportunity.

Of course, FIG is not primarily aimed at traditional surveyors, the ten commissions setup cover everything from education and standards to spatial data infrastructures, planning and development , real estate, valuations and also construction economics. In all, FIG covers everything to do with land and as we are seeing more and more evidence of, almost all information collected is being linked back to the land.

FIG is a large, global body tasked with promoting professional practice and standards for all things surveying. As the theme of this congress is ‘Facing the Challenges – Building the Capacity’ there looks to be underwhelming support on how we grow this industry as a whole.
 
Spatial Data forum logoIt is an exciting time to be  ayoung professional in this industry. We have seen in the past few years that giants such as Google has taken what we do and thrust it into the limelight. Google Maps, if anything, has heightened the value of visualising information in map form yet there is little understanding of how this information is generated, maintained and delivered to applications such as Google Maps. 
 
Increasing the awareness and importance of the Surveying and Spatial Industries does present a challenge to us. The challenges lie in growing the interest of students to study and join our profession, in increasing the importance of location in all types of data, the connection and integration of data and the interpretation of data providing the evidence to build and prepare for the future. No small task by anyone’s imagination.
 
During this congress the Young Surveyors Group are holding a number of sessions as well as presenting on topics of how to attract more young professionals into this industry. The roundtable discussion scheduled for Tuesday 13th of April will surely be an interesting open discussion on how we as a whole can tackle these issues. It is nice to see that through a structured congress, social mediums such as Facebook provide the tools to reach out and invite all those who have an interest to voice their opinions both online and face to face.
 
The plenary sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday titled ‘Spatially Enabled Society and ‘The Big Challenges’ respectively are shaping to be very interesting talks and I wholeheartedly recommend arriving early for a good seat.
 
The week will sure to be jammed packed and while I and others will be there at 7am each morning to help setup and coordinate the activities I hope to see you all at FIG 2010. If the registrations are anything to go by this will surely be the biggest congress of its type in Australia for the last few years.
 
 

Darren Mottolini is a member of the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI), and a young ambassador for the FIG 2010 Congress. In 2008 he was awarded the WA Young Professional of the Year award through the SSSI community. Currently, Darren is responsible for the strategic directions of the Western Australian Shared Land Information Platform, a federated spatial data infrastructure that is widely recognised as a leader in open source and standards implementation. He maintains a personal blog, ProjectSpatialwhere he discusses location information, technology and smart use of location data throughout Australia.

SHARE WITH: