Martin Gurtner

dipl. Verm.Ing. ETHZ

Process Topographic Bases

swisstopo, Federal Office of Topography,

Seftigenstr. 264, CH-3084 Wabern,

Switzerland

tel. +41 31 963 22 72, fax +41 31 963 24 59

[email-masked]

Switzerland

Martin Gurtner is a surveyor from the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Polytech) and has been with swisstopo, the Federal Office of Topography since 1974. He did levelling and triangulation jobs, but his main tasks were and still are in the Topography Division. He was the last to use the plane table for the verification of the cadastral base maps (produced by private surveyors). He collected all the written and non-written instructions for the map content and produced the “red bible” containing the specifications for each symbol. As co-head of the process Topographic Bases he is responsible for the content of the Swiss National Map Series. The project for a new topographic landscape model TLM was initiated in 1999 and is supposed to start production in 2008. He still does some field checking himself and – as an active alpinist –uses the maps on many occasions.