e-survey Forum

Is it possible to create a tabulation sheet in a 3rd party software and attach it to the dataset as a supporting document? I have looked at a few examples of survey plans on moderate sized subdivisions and the majority are not overly well presented or are over 40 pages long. Tabulating peg ties within LoL is quite a process to get things all lined up and presented well. Can anyone point us to any good examples of survey plan generation of large subdivisions or even better advise whether peg ties may be supplied as a supporting document?

In the old days, it was acceptable to tabulate peg ties and present this on the survey sheet. Personally, I disliked this technique as all it did was put the information more readily at hand than on a traverse sheet (and it introduced another source of error, whereas computer generated traverse sheets at least obtained the pegging information relative to earlier T/S entries). It did not aid the reader in interpreting the plan. At best, the peg ties were tabulated adjacent to the corresponding witness mark. At worst, they were on a separate survey sheet.

All this is now irrelevant on an e-survey plan, as a Mark and Observation report is included in a Digital Survey Plan. Therefore, when someone obtains a copy of the DSP, they automatically obtain a tabulation of the pegging ties. This is in contrast to a hardcopy survey plan, which would require extra effort to also obtain a tabulation of the pegging ties (ie the T/S). Your suggestion, to attach a tabulation of the pegging ties, is therefore redundant, as the Mark and Observation report is exactly that (albeit in a harder to interpret manner).

Whether leaving off the pegging tie observations and having user-added text stating something like "See Mark and Observation report for pegging information" on the plan face is acceptable to LINZ, I would not care to guess. But taking this to a rediculous extreme, you could then leave off all dimensions and say the same, which no-one would suggest you do. I do note, however, that leaving dimensions off your survey plan generates a validation warning which "will need to be either corrected or covered in the Survey Report".

I don't think a separate tabulation would be completely redundant, because there's a big difference between trying to find a particular pegtie or set of pegties in the often less-than-ideally-organised M&O report, and finding one in a properly-organised and laid out schedule of pegties. That said, I don't know if it's necessarily the best solution.

In theory (and in our experience), many items that are required to be shown on "the plans" can be shown using a user-attached Plan Graphic or similar. For example I've used this to attach a separate plan of abutting parcel appellations in the past, where depicting the surrounding appells on the lol-generated plans would (in that particular situation) have required a lot of extra work and laying out in the tedious Define Diags/Layout Plan Sheets screens. This posed no problems either in presentation of the final plans, or in gaining survey approval. In principle, pegtie tabulation could work similarly.

But - Speculating, I think that automatic validation of plan elements is a major advantage (particularly for LINZ) of rigidly sticking to the standard system (e.g. full Lol Plan Generation). If you draw it manually, it's got to be checked manually later by LINZ, thus more work for them, thus they don't like it. Especially true of cadastre-affecting survey/observation elements. Hence the element of uncertainty exists as to exactly where the line is drawn (so to speak :) ) - just how much allowance is there for deviation from the inbuilt system? I suspect it's going to be one of the undefined issues that there's no real answer to, except the (un)tried-and-(un)tested "case-by-case basis" method.