FIG Article of the Month

Article of the Month in 2025

FIG publishes each month the Article of the Month. This is a high-level paper focusing on interesting topic to all surveyors. This article can be picked up from an FIG conference or another event or it can be a paper written directly for this purpose.

October 2025 A paper written by Nigel Conolly, Australia. Why do I need to articulate the value of AI in Geospatial? The paper stresses the power of AI in achieving leveraged growth, where AI can drastically reduce the time required to develop geospatial applications.

September 2025 A paper written by R.D. Shah and Bihar Wing Patna , India. Climate Responsive Land Governance and Disaster Resilience: Safeguarding Land Rights in Asia What are Asian surveyors doing about climate? This paper explores the link between climate responsive land governance, disaster resilience and tenure security and its challenges in the region.

August 2025 A paper from FIG Working Week 2025 Nozipho Madlala, South Africa Empowering the Next Generation of Surveyors: A Journey of Leadership, Mentorship, and Overcoming Challenges The presentation explores how emerging surveyors can be nurtured through deliberate leadership development, structured mentorship pathways, and resilient engagement with the realities of the profession.

July 2025 Keynote speacker from FIG Working Week 2025, Linda Foster, USA GIS and the Geospatial Ecosystem: Creating the World You Want to See This presentation explores how the Accelerated technological innovation is presenting an opportunity for geospatial professionals to transform some of the world’s most pressing challenges and create the world they want to see.

June 2025 A peer review paper from FIG Working Week 2025 in Brisbane by Paul Denys, Yuxi Jin, Jett Gannaway, Hamish Gibson, New Zealand Measuring GNSS RTK Positioning Errors The paper investigates how reduced signal availability (satellite geometry) in challenging environments affects RTK coordinate accuracy.

May 2025 A position paper from FIG Commission 10 by Asst. Professor Ts. Sr Dr. Nadzirah Hj. Zainordin and Ts. Sr Khoo Sui Lai Digital Transformation in Quantity Surveying: Paving the Way for Smart Cities and Professional Evolution. The paper explains the role of Quantity Surveyors in the era of Digital Construction.

April 2025 a peer review paper from the FIG working Week 2025 by Hamid Hosseini, Behnam Atazadeh and Abbas Rajabifard, Australia Artificial Intelligence for Querying Land and Property Data from Cadastral Plans The paper is a studie of an AI-based approach to efficiently retrieve land and property information from cadastral plans. This includes data extraction from plans using computer vision and communication with plans using natural language processing (NLP). A prototype chatbot employing generative pretrained transformer (GPT) as the core large language model (LLM) was developed for data querying from plans.

March 2025 A position paper from FIG Commissions 2 and 7 The Teaching Essentials for Responsible Land Administration (TERLA) It addressed the challenge of teaching the daunting and complex domain of land governance at a country-level. It looks back on that foundation work, unpacking lessons, but also draws on the insights of those valuators and educators deeply engaged with its application to case forward.

February 2025 A short version of the article written by Fritz Staudacher Albert Einstein and Heinrich Wild: The Beginning of two Great Global Careers. A describing until now unknown relations between Nobel Price winner Albert Einstein and Heinrich Wild, the most important designer of geodetic and photogrammetric instruments of the last century.

January 2025 A paper from the FIG Regional Confernce 2024, Nepal written by Nok-hang NG, Hong Kong SAR, China Unlocking the Potential of Earth Observation Data in Cultivating a Climate-Resilient City It discusses the role of remote sensing and Earth Observation (EO) data in addressing climate change issues in Hong Kong.