Spatial Reference

This service provides spatial information such as control point co-ordinates and Topographic Maps in South Africa, various surveying or spatially related calculations and co-ordinate conversion services. Spatial Reference is intended for a wide field of users such as Land Surveyors, Town Planners, Engineers, Architects, Geologists, etc... The map service that was recently added also provides information for a whole new community such as photogrammetrists, pilots (For flight planning), educational institutions, etc...

This service is FREE and you simply need to Register for free and then log on to start using Spatial Reference.

Control Points and Co-ordinates:
The Spatial Reference database contains co-ordinates for almost all Trig Beacons and Town Survey Marks in South Africa in both the WGS84 system and the older Clarke 1880 system. You can either search for specific control points using the name / number or you can search for a control point using the co-ordinate. Another very useful tools is the Local Points Service which requires a point to be specified and then finds all control within a specified radial distance from that point. These services greatly reduce the time needed to find control before surveying or mapping a site.

Topographic Maps:
This service was recently added and provides about 1600 topographic maps covering the entire surface of South Africa. These maps have been obtained from the Chief Directorate : Surveys and Mapping and converted to a user-friendly format (.JPEG) that is easy to download and view from this website. The graphical map selection interface makes selecting a specific map very easy and is useful for extracting spatial information for surveying, planning, navigation, flight planning, education purposes, etc...

Online Calculation Services:
Many surveying / spatially related online calculation services have been added since the site started about a year ago. These include calculations such as Join, Polar, Intersection and Resection calculations. Point co-ordinates can also be converted from Gauss conform mapping co-ordinates to Geographical (Latitude and Longitude) co-ordinates and vies versa.

Point Memory Service:
The point memory service was added to make using Spatial Reference even easier since it stores co-ordinates of points obtained in searches and calculations in the session memory making it available for all the different services provided by this site. This greatly reduce time needed and human-error when copying co-ordinates from one service to another.

Cell phone Version:
Most of the services are also available on a smaller interface intended for cell phones. This provides a means to search for control point co-ordinates or to do calculations in the field while surveying.

Spatial Reference is constantly looking for more ways to maintain a high level of security for account data and information, but accept no responsibility for the theft or leak of information. Spatial Reference encourage users to check data supplied by this service against your companies Accuracy Standards and accept no responsibility for the misinterpretation of the data and errors caused by using data supplied by this Service.