Spotmaster, based in ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, has been building bespoke workflow apps for field service work since 2005, from field service to track and trace. One of those applications is the Geo.Planner Monitoring app, which Spotmaster developed for Fugro: the field tool Fugro’s monitoring teams use to record their work. Geomonitoring is about installing and reading out measurement instrumentation over longer periods.
In monitoring, everything depends on the position of the measurement point. A settlement marker or monitoring well that cannot be found back exactly produces a series of readings nobody is willing to build on. That is where the link with marXact comes in.
How the Spotmaster integration works
The field worker surveys the measurement points with a marXact GNSS receiver, for example the UNI-GR2: a centimetre-accurate RTK position. The measurements sync to UNI-Cloud, and through the UNI-Cloud API the coordinates flow on to the Spotmaster workflow environment as GeoJSON. That GeoJSON endpoint is listed in our API documentation as “GeoJson (Beta)”. Every instrument in the app has a position that is right, without retyping or separate export files.
GeoJSON is a deliberate choice here: it is an open standard that almost every modern web application reads directly, so the integration stays light and maintainable.
A concrete example
Say an inner-city excavation pit is surrounded by 80 survey bolts and 12 monitoring wells. When the monitoring network is set up, the field crew surveys every point; the positions land in the workflow app through UNI-Cloud. Every reading round after that starts with certainty: the field worker is standing at the right point, even after a year and three construction phases. And when a bolt is destroyed during the work, the replacement is surveyed the same way and the series carries on.
Fugro uses digital surveying in other departments as well. The customer case Fugro voert bodemonderzoek uit, ondersteunt door digitaal in te meten met marXact from 2021 describes how their soil investigation teams worked with the UNI-GR1 at the time. That case is separate from the geomonitoring workflow in this article.
Van start gaan
The building blocks are a marXact GNSS receiver with RTK corrections and UNI-Cloud; the technical side runs through the UNI-Cloud API. Receiver, app, cloud environment and corrections come together in one package: survey it yourself with the UNI-Collect Survey Package.
Questions about workflow integrations with UNI-Cloud? Get in touch.