In highways unless the task is purely administrative basically anything you do has a strong geospatial component. The way we describe a location can vary widely. Mile points are objectively the best way to describe location from an engineering standpoint but in the field the only datum you may find is a MP sign / bridge. Even if you found a MP you have no idea which direction the road goes to, or how reference another point along it.

This yields field data like: “0.1 miles north of Fisher Chapel Church”, effectively establishing a LRS system that then has to be decoded to back in the office. To get MPs, we finally look at straight lines, establish directionality, and do some arithmetic. The complexity of that task is trivial, but the translation on both ends is done hundreds of times a day.

LRS is effectively a fancy way of saying mile point, we’ve had mile points since we’ve had roads, the problem isn’t that we can’t describe it, the problem is that we don’t have it at the times we actually need it the most. In this proposal I’ll discuss a framework for describing location that is universal regardless of the person, department, or application at hand.