SUVA, Aug. 29 (Xinhua) -- Fiji's Permanent Secretary for Lands and Mineral Resources Josefa Caniogo on Thursday called on surveyors to collaborate with geospatial scientists, as technology evolves.

According to a government press release, speaking at the opening of the Fiji Institute of Surveyors (FIS) Survey Congress in Rakiraki, the northern coast of Fiji's largest island Viti Levu,

Caniogo said this would allow surveyors to not only capture, compute and create spatial information but enable various layers of information in different systems to be integrated and inter-operable.

Technology is helping Fiji quickly move forward in land development, he said, adding that while modern survey practice has progressed, the system in place to administer and regulate survey practice has very much remained the same creating a vacuum and detachment from current realities of survey practice.

With evolving methodologies and technologies, Caniogo said that survey practice was constantly changing necessitating frameworks to regulate the practices and address these emerging changes.

He said the current surveyor's regulations in Fiji are outdated as they are based mainly on surveys carried out with survey instruments used at the time the current regulations first came into force some four decades ago.

It is important to keep abreast with the skill set to enable them to professionally use the modern technology to the optimum, he added.

Fiji Institute of Surveyors President Paserio Samisoni said earlier that there is a shortage of registered surveyors in the island nation and this is becoming a major concern for them.

Currently, there are only 37 registered surveyors in the nation and most of them were 50 and 60 years old.