Engineering Surveying within ASCE

Surveying engineering may be regarded as a specialty within the broader professional practice of engineering and includes all surveying and mapping activities required to support sound conception, planning, design, construction, maintenance, and operation of engineered projects. This chapter introduces the key concepts of surveying engineering that are discussed in subsequent chapters. These include the leading role of ASCE's Surveying and Geomatics Division in surveying engineering, and more broadly, geomatics, the “mathematics of the earth”; the role of surveying engineers in providing an increasing level of sophisticated mapping, positioning, control, monitoring, and in some cases, navigation information; and the role in the United States of each state's licensing board in determining, in conjunction with the state legislature, what the definition of surveying entails.