U. S. Coast & Geodetic Survey Time Enabled Online Map

[Amygdaloid]

I recently had an issue with my iPhone and after restoring it from factory I realized I had lost the HuntMarkers app, and it is no longer available in the App store. I had downloaded the Survey Mark archive from NGS in the past so I have been playing around with it to see if I can replace the app. I did some clean up of the data and have uploaded it to an online mapping system (ArcGIS Online) and made an interactive, time enabled map based on each marks first recovery date. That date seems to generally be within a year of the date the mark was set based on the spot checks I have done. I also removed any records that did not have a first recovery date and I only included data up to 1971. Even with that the map still has over 470,000 records!

 

Here is a link to the map: Survey Marks 1830-1970

 

Here is a screenshot of the map:

 

You can use the play control at the bottom of the map to play back the survey control timeline automatically or to step through manually. By default it shows the data in 5 year increments, but you can change that from as low as 1 year increments to the full period with the tool icon to the right of the time line slider or by moving the time window handles on the slider control. If you make the time window to large it won't be able to show all the data, but if you zoom in on the map you can display a larger time window. If you click on a survey mark on the map, information from the data sheet will popup, and you can also click on links to go straight to the NGS data sheet or the Geocaching Benchmark page, if it has one. See below for a description of the symbols which are based on the last condition reported in the data sheets. Using the time filter with the map really lets you dig into the data and I've already found marks that I wasn't aware of and to see how the different surveys come through an area over time. It's also very easy to jump from this map into the Geocaching page to see what has been found already in a given area.

 

Let me know what you think of this map.

 

I also created a youtube video using this map, link is below:

 

 

The video displays U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey survey marks in 5 year increments from 1830 - 1930.

 

Symbology represents last condition reported as described below.

 

Green Triangle = Good

Red Cross = Not Found

Yellow Circle = Monumented

Red Circle = Poor

Blue Circle = First Observed

Pink Circle = See Description

[Amygdaloid]

I forgot to mention that this map works best when viewed with a browser on a desktop computer. I don't think the timeline feature works on mobile devices so it will try and display ALL of the survey marks which is overwhelming on a small device.

[mloser]

That's sweet! I will have to play around with it a bit.

[mloser]

Is something broken? I get a message that says The layer, NGS_Control_View, cannot be added to the map.

 

Earlier today I didn't get the error but just couldn't see any marks.

[Amygdaloid]

Yep, it's broken at the moment. Sorry about that. I was attempting to update the data so it would display the type of mark (triangulation station, benchmark, magnetic, etc), description and stamped text and something has gone wrong with the process. I'll post once I get it back up.

 

The system I'm using uses credits based on the size of the database so I'm also trying to reduce the size. I'm only loading data up to 1972 since I'm most interested in Coast & Geodetic Survey marks not the later styles from NGS. I've also removed marks that are not monuments with a disk or a pipe cap (no drill holes, church spires, antennas, mountain peaks, etc for now). I'll put them back if I can figure out how to manage the size.

[mloser]

Please include drill holes and bolts! Those are some of the oldest and coolest marks. You can leave out intersection stations as the NGS no longer takes reports on them, so they really don't matter.

[kayakbird]

One glitch that I noticed is that any mark that does not have the true Monumented date (for example many MORC's [bUNKER HILL QS0741], IBC's and PLN's)

 

1880's MORC not 1948

 

will not show up in a selected date bracket. Haven't tried DSWORLD lately, but in GSAK I used to sort various combinations of Waypoint Name, Placed, Placed By, Date and maybe Code to get these older sub-sets in proper order.

 

Then you could enter these PID's en-mass and get them pasted into a Google Earth .kmz file. Clicking on the map pins would give a menu with Data Sheet & Geocache links. MEL

[Amygdaloid]

Please include drill holes and bolts! Those are some of the oldest and coolest marks. You can leave out intersection stations as the NGS no longer takes reports on them, so they really don't matter.

 

The map should be back now. Please let me know if you can see it ok. I probably got to aggressive with removing types and can add some things back in ( I just realized I removed my oldest find!). Ultimately I'd like to have everything available. With the additional descriptive data I added in I'm experimenting using symbols on the mark type rather than last condition. Let me know what you think about it. There are a lot of different types so it's a challenge to differentiate them all. I should mention there is a filter option so you can easily just show what you want, something like type is pipe cap, condition is good, last recovered by is geocache. Use the time slider with the query and you can pretty quickly find what you want. You could also filter on PID or name/stamping text to find a specific mark.

[Amygdaloid]

Yep, it's only going to be able to display the timeline based on whatever the dates in the data say. I've only seen the first recovered and last recovered dates in the NGS data. I'm looking at your BUNKER HILL Q0741 example, the data sheet doesn't seem to ever mention the original 1889 date. How did you find that date? You mentioned using a "placed by" and "placed date", is that data available someplace? If you can point me to a data source I can add it in as long as it has the PID also.

 

I've never used DSWORLD OR GSAK, so can't really comment on that workflow.

 

.

 

One glitch that I noticed is that any mark that does not have the true Monumented date (for example many MORC's [bUNKER HILL QS0741], IBC's and PLN's)

 

1880's MORC not 1948

 

will not show up in a selected date bracket. Haven't tried DSWORLD lately, but in GSAK I used to sort various combinations of Waypoint Name, Placed, Placed By, Date and maybe Code to get these older sub-sets in proper order.

 

Then you could enter these PID's en-mass and get them pasted into a Google Earth .kmz file. Clicking on the map pins would give a menu with Data Sheet & Geocache links. MEL

[mloser]

It's working. There certainly are a lot of survey mark types (although in my area we seem to only have the basics).

 

Kayakbird--there already IS a Google Earth KMZ file implementation written by Foxtrot_xray that works very well (although the topo map feature recently broke, but is being repaired). You can find more at http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=307146