A day* in the life of GIS+
*Depending on baseline expectations, a GIS day can range anywhere between one second and three years.
+Graphics In a Second
Normal text: Requestor
Bold text: My responses
[Bold italic text]: Intrusive thoughts / contemporaneous field notes
23/09 10:02 AM
Morning, how are you going?
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23/09 10:03 AM
I'm good, how about you?
[Notes: One minute to respond. Strong opening. Efficient but still human. He does not, of course, care how I am going. Nobody has ever opened Teams at 10:02 AM because of an uncontrollable desire to know how Thou is travelling emotionally. The pleasantry mask is up. Somewhere behind it is a polygon.]
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23/09 10:05 AM
I'm good thank you.
Is there any chance you would be able to help me out with some aerial imagery from Nearmap on project?
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23/09 10:06 AM
For sure, whereabouts?
[Notes: Always keen to help. This is still theoretically a two-minute job. A project number would be premium here. A charge code would be bordering on science fiction. Won't get one. This particular ecosystem also contains a supervisor known for the Friday-afternoon "friendly reminder" about timesheets, which adds a pleasing layer of administrative theatre to work that apparently exists outside the space-time continuum.]
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23/09 10:08 AM
Something like that boundary if possible?
(Attaches a screenshot with a markup that the kids would be proud of.)
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23/09 10:08 AM
Any preference for date, or latest possible do?
[Notes: The spatial specification has arrived as a hand-drawn shape on a screenshot. Somewhere, OGC standards quietly close their eyes.]
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23/09 10:09 AM
latest possible please
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23/09 10:09 AM
August 2026 is best in class.
[Notes: Nearmap searched, available captures assessed, most recent suitable imagery identified. We're still inside the bounds of "quick favour". Nobody panic.]
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23/09 10:16 AM
Thank you greatly!
[Notes: "Greatly." Interesting escalation. The superlative combined with the exclamation mark is an early indicator that financial compensation is now highly unlikely. See also the corporate praise lexicon: LEGEND!, ROCKSTAR!, WEAPON!, CHAMPION! All historically reliable substitutes for a valid project code.
There were once dreams of being a rockstar, admittedly. Unfortunately the insufferable pentatonic lead breaks in E were never going to pay for a mortgage. As for "legend", I have never pulled a sword from a stone, founded a civilisation, or slain anything more formidable than a corrupted shapefile, so expectations should remain calibrated.]
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23/09 10:36 AM
(Attachment of deliverable aerial image covering the site at 7.5cm resolution provided.)
Looks good.
[Notes: Twenty-minute turnaround from vague screenshot to current georeferenced imagery. This is the fundamental GIS business-model problem: make something difficult look easy and everyone quite reasonably concludes it must have been easy.
I really need to become less efficient. Perhaps introduce a ceremonial overnight wait.]
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23/09 10:38 AM
Legend, thank you for that!
[Notes: And there it is.
Legend? No.
Nostradamus? Increasingly plausible.
The ability to accurately forecast the next move of a simple workflow remains one of my stronger competencies.]
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23/09 1:26 PM
There's a reasonable point-cloud available from FSDF Elevation in 2018 which is good enough for a 0.5 m to 1 m DEM.
[Notes: This was not requested.
This is important.
Somewhere between "can I get an aerial?" and lunch, I have voluntarily located the most recent useful open-source LiDAR coverage, assessed the vintage, downloaded several hundred megabytes of nested government archives, and begun wondering whether its ground-point density is sufficient to support a terrain model.
Why?
Excellent question.
Apparently once a GIS person detects adjacent spatial value, stopping becomes neurologically difficult.
We are also in a particularly good area for publicly available ground data. So naturally instead of saying "here is your photograph", the brain has gone: "Yes, but what if it also had elevation?"
This is how we got here.]
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23/09 1:34 PM
Cheers
[Notes: A Six character word is a perfectly reasonable response to approximately three hours of unsolicited data acquisition.
At this point the LiDAR is still technically merely an interesting aside. A fascinating archaeological snapshot from the brief period before it becomes tomorrow's requirement.]
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24/09 4:52 PM
Hi, would I be able to grab that point cloud survey please?
[Notes: Twenty-seven hours later.
I am Nostradamus.
Yesterday's unrequested value-add has completed the standard enterprise lifecycle:
interesting → useful → expected → deliverable.
Observe the speed at which scope reproduces when left unattended.]
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25/09 1:17 PM
Read the File List.pdf for what these are (referring to the attachment of a dream project baseline data startup which was provided).
[Notes: At this point, "grab that point cloud" has evolved somewhat.
The original raw LiDAR delivery has been preserved.
Twenty individual point-cloud tiles have been interrogated rather than simply thrown into a viewer. Point counts, total density, ground density, classifications and return distributions have been inventoried. Ground-point coverage has been assessed to decide whether the data genuinely supports a 0.5 m or 1 m bare-earth DEM rather than selecting a resolution because the number sounded impressive.
Two DEM products have been generated.
A near-contemporary aerial image has been sourced to approximately match the LiDAR epoch.
The tiled clouds have been merged.
RGB values have been burned into the point cloud to produce a colourised LAS.
The current Nearmap orthophoto has been retained alongside it for present-day context.
Projection differences have been reconciled into the appropriate MGA Zone on the GDA2020 datum.
CSV inventories have been produced.
A twenty-page tile-by-tile QA report has been produced.
A rendered image has been supplied so somebody can understand what the colourised cloud looks like without opening a 4.5 GB LAS file.
A file manifest has been written explaining all of the above. The final package genuinely contains the raw source, 0.5 m and 1 m DEMs, the colourised point cloud, imagery, statistical inventories and a tile report. File List File List
In other words, the original request was:
"Can I have an aerial image?"
The eventual response was approximately:
"Here is a small geospatial information system."
This is ostensibly being done to demonstrate the group's capability and service offering.
It remains free.
It has also been completed while servicing one of the company's major clients.
The phrase "value add" is normally used in PowerPoint presentations. Occasionally it escapes containment and actually occurs.]
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13/10 10:31 AM
So ive loaded in the point cloud data... but it's not the correct area for the project.
[Notes: Three weeks later.
The circle closes.
Not with a crash.
Not even with an error message.
Just one quiet Teams notification.
Naturally, the first diagnosis upon eventually viewing it is that the GIS data is wrong
The imagery was produced from the boundary supplied.
The LiDAR was sourced around the area implied by the same request.
The datasets were inspected, transformed, analysed, documented, colourised and packaged.
But somewhere upstream of all this, the fundamental spatial primitive - where is the project? - has apparently undergone a late design revision.
There is something beautifully pure about this.
We can resolve coordinate systems.
We can inspect six million points per square kilometre.
We can differentiate ground, vegetation, buildings, water, roads, bridges and transmission infrastructure from hundreds of millions of laser returns.
We can interpolate a bare-earth surface to half a metre.
We can reconcile imagery captured years apart.
We can transfer RGB values into three-dimensional points.
But no available GIS algorithm can yet compensate for:
"Nah, not there."
And thus concludes another day in GIS.
Duration: 20 days.
Chargeable time: unclear.
Graphics produced: several gigabytes.
Initial requirement: one aerial image.
Final lesson: before commencing advanced geospatial analysis, confirm that the polygon depicting the project actually depicts the project.]
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13/10 11:31 AM
Did I miss with the cut or is the projection on the piss? Would be in MGA / GDA2020. Had a quick look and lines up.
[Notes: Immediate self-audit.
Check the cut.
Check the projection.
Check the coordinate system.
Check the bounds.
Check the original hand-drawn kindergarten polygon.
Everything lines up.
The LiDAR is exactly where it was asked to be.
This is the professional equivalent of hearing a smoke alarm and checking your own house before noticing someone next door is making toast.]
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13/10 11:33 AM
Yeah sorry, i was reloading that again after i sent that... Might be alright, its just taking a while to load in
[Notes: And there it is.
The point cloud was not in the wrong place.
The projection was not wrong.
The cut was not wrong.
The source boundary was not wrong.
The data was simply... loading.
Three weeks of dwell time.
Two minutes of accusation.
Then redemption by progress bar.
A 4.5 GB colourised point cloud containing millions upon millions of spatially referenced observations had apparently failed the ultimate QA test:
it did not appear instantaneously.
This is perhaps the purest summary of modern technical work.
The data can be spatially correct, vertically plausible, properly classified, projection-consistent, documented, inventoried, statistically reviewed and packaged with supporting imagery.
But if it takes 90 seconds to draw, suspicion immediately falls on the person who made it.
Meanwhile, the twenty-day period during which nobody looked at it is considered operationally normal.
And this, more than anything, explains the title:
A day in the life of GIS.
One day to produce it.
Twenty days to open it.
Two minutes to conclude it might be wrong.
Another two minutes to discover that Windows was still thinking.]
[GIS Experience] GIS Analyst for 20+ years
[AI Disclosure] No AI was harmed
