Approximate Local Drawing Setup

Inside the workflow

Give a local-coordinate drawing the practical GIS experience of a georeferenced project without presenting it as survey control.

Approximate Local Drawing Setup is built for surveyors working without an assigned real CRS. In West Virginia, the surveyor can enter the county, district, tax map, and parcel or parcels, select the drawing's fixed units, and pick the approximate center of the surveyed property in the drawing. GIS Evidence Workspace uses the requested MapWV parcel area as an initial approximate anchor, then lets the surveyor fine-tune the GIS display with move and rotate controls. The result is a drawing-specific internal approximate reference that compatible GILES POINT SOFTWARE tools can recognize without changing the drawing's coordinates or geometry.

Detailed capabilities

• Works as a standalone manual setup; a validated Parcel Finder or GILES POINT COMMAND project may prefill location fields, but neither product is required.
• Accepts controlled West Virginia state, county, district, tax map, parcel, optional suffix, and multi-parcel information along with US survey foot, international foot, or metre drawing units.
• Uses the requested MapWV parcel extent only to establish an initial approximate center; it does not fit, compare, reshape, or validate the surveyor's boundary.
• Creates a drawing-specific internal approximate reference recognized by compatible GILES POINT SOFTWARE tools when the DWG has no assigned real CRS.
• Provides a closeable GIS Display Controls window for north, south, east, and west nudges plus clockwise and counterclockwise rotation, with reset to the original parcel-centered placement.
• Applies the latest saved nudge and rotation across compatible GIS viewers and layers in that DWG. Scale cannot be adjusted, and the setup never warps or rubber-sheets GIS content to resemble the drawing.
• Stores the setup and its revision in the DWG so the project can return to the same approximate alignment; each accepted adjustment refreshes compatible GIS surfaces.
• Allows supported GIS attribute lookup, approximate label context, live viewing, and approximate source-area or imagery download workflows.
• Keeps Coordinate Labeler available only as a coarse reference: grid values are rounded to at least 100 drawing units, fixed at low precision, and visibly headed BW APPROXIMATE LOCAL - NOT SURVEY CONTROL.
• Disables latitude/longitude output and does not allow the surveyor to increase coordinate precision while approximate local mode is active.
• Leaves precise coordinate labels, NGS survey-control placement, staking, monument placement, and exact LiDAR or imagery placement for drawings with a valid real-world CRS.
• Automatically yields to a valid assigned real-world CRS if one is established later; the real CRS becomes the coordinate authority without altering the surveyor's geometry.

How the surveyor uses it

1. Choose Approximate Local Drawing Setup in a DWG that has no assigned real-world CRS.
2. Enter the West Virginia county, district, tax map, parcel information, and fixed drawing units.
3. Pick the approximate center of the surveyed property in the local drawing.
4. Open the supported GIS view and use the closeable display controls to nudge or rotate the context when needed.
5. Use compatible viewers, source lookups, LABEL tools, and supported downloads with the approximate status kept visible.
6. If the project later receives a valid real CRS, assign it through the real-CRS workflow so precise coordinate and control functions can become available.