Survey
GIS & Geospatial
Area of practice · Donald W. Parnell, PE
County-scale GIS basemap production for a statewide roadway inventory, aerial-imagery georeferencing and digitization, cartographic and attribute-database work, municipal tax-jurisdiction mapping, and utility, facilities, and environmental-feature mapping.
Statewide Roadway Inventory
County GIS basemap production
The largest geospatial project of Mr. Parnell’s career was the implementation of the North Carolina Department of Transportation roadway inventory system, performed as a state-approved vendor under an open-ended contract during the RDU CAD Design period. Using Bentley platforms and GIS add-ons, he created 36 of the state’s 100 county basemaps. Each county required research into the available mapping sources — existing county and municipal maps, aerial photography, USGS quadrangles, and DOT route records — to select and reconcile the sources from which the road network would be digitized. The road centerlines were then digitized to a common coordinate framework, and every attribute and GIS element in those 36 basemaps — route identification, classification, and the inventory fields the system required — was created manually and specifically by him rather than converted from an existing dataset.
Imagery and Georeferencing
Aerial imagery, georeferencing, and digitization
Basemap and mapping work relied on aerial imagery brought into the project coordinate system by georeferencing: identifying control points common to the image and the ground reference, transforming the image to fit, and checking the residuals before features were digitized from it. Mr. Parnell performed this georeferencing and digitization across the roadway-inventory counties and on other mapping assignments, producing vector features tied to real-world coordinates from scanned and aerial sources.
Attribution and Cartography
Database attribution and map production
Geospatial work extended beyond geometry to the attribute data that makes a feature useful: the fields, codes, and identifiers attached to each road segment or mapped element so that the database can be queried and the map symbolized. Mr. Parnell built and populated attribute tables for the features he digitized and produced cartographic output — symbolized, labeled, and sheeted maps — from the resulting datasets for delivery to the client.
Municipal Mapping
Tax-jurisdiction mapping
For Tate Lanning & Associates, Mr. Parnell produced a tax-jurisdiction map for the Town of Newton Grove, North Carolina. The map defined the corporate limits and the parcels falling within the town’s taxing jurisdiction on a geospatial base, reconciling recorded boundaries and parcel data with the mapped road network so that the town had a single authoritative map of what it taxed.
Facilities Mapping
AM/FM for industrial process piping
At Mallinckrodt in Raleigh, Mr. Parnell worked on an automated mapping and facilities management project covering the plant’s process-piping network as represented in its piping and instrumentation diagrams. AM/FM applies the GIS model to a facility: each pipe run, valve, and instrument becomes a located, attributed element in a database rather than a line on a drawing, so that the plant can be queried, maintained, and modified from the data. The process-piping content of this work is described under Process Piping; the geospatial method belongs here.
Network Mapping
Utility and communications network mapping
The same mapping methods were applied to utility networks. For Time Warner Cable, through PinTech of Wilmington, Mr. Parnell mapped cable-television plant — nodes, amplifiers, power supplies, and passive devices along the distribution network — as described under Telecommunications. This was not a drawing of the plant but an attributed network: each mapped element carried its device intelligence, such as device type and model, amplifier settings and signal levels, port and leg assignments, and power-supply feed, so the dataset could be queried for the state of the plant and used directly in the amplifier optimization work. Roadway inventory, facilities management, and network mapping share the same underlying structure: a network digitized to coordinates, with attributes carried on every element.
Environmental Features
Watershed and wetland mapping
Watershed boundaries delineated for substation site development at the City of Austin Electric Utility Department, and wetland boundaries delineated for roadway projects at Pope Air Force Base for KCI Technologies, were mapped onto the project base so that drainage design, alignment, and permitting could proceed from a common geospatial reference. The delineation work itself is described under Water Resources; the mapping of those boundaries belongs here.
About this record. This site is a working record of professional experience, maintained to verify subject-matter background. Areas of practice are reached from the menu above. The record is expanded as additional work history is documented.
Donald W. Parnell, PE | North Carolina PE No. 33878