There are four ways of navigating the map, all of which may be used at any time.

1. Draw a Rectangle: select Zoom Box under Map Tool. Click and drag a rectangle in the map view. The map view will then change to your specified area.

2. Navigation Buttons: clicking on the four blue buttons will immediately affect the map view. Full Extent changes the map view to show the entire state. Zoom + and Zoom - zoom by a factor of 2 from the center of the current view. Redraw Map refreshes the current map view.

3. Zoom to County: by selecting a county name from the drop-down box will then zoom to the county extent.

4. Directional Pan Buttons: clicking on any of the four pan buttons situated around the borders of the map will move the map view in that corresponding direction.

Identify and query control points
Having navigated to your area of interest, the Map Tool can be changed to allow identification of control points. To do this, click on the Identify Box. You are now ready to click and drag a rectangle in the map view to identify control points, or just click on a specific point. Once you have identified the control point(s), the right side will display information about the points at that location. The selected points will be highlighted in yellow in the map view.

Below the point information are two hyperlinks: the first, View Full Record, leads to more detailed point and dataset information displayed in a new window. The second, Add to Results, adds the point to a user-defined list that is maintained for your current session with ControlFinder. Points in this list are symbolized on the interactive map and remain selected until you leave the application.

To query or locate a specific point, use the Search Box by selecting the agency type and by entering the point ID or stamping.

Online Condition Report Form
To report a disturbed, recovered, or destroyed station, select the link Survey Station Condition Report from either the full extent view (3rd paragraph on right side) or from within the "view record" for a particular point.

Printing
At any time you wish to print a PDF of the map image you're viewing, select the "Print Map" button located in the lower left corner of the map view.

To view your saved results, click on the button View Saved Results. This is where you can view the point records saved which can be exported as a delimited text file for use in other software. The saved NGS point records can also be exported to SDMS CTL format.

For problems with…
•   Retrieving data
•   Missing data
•   Broken links, etc.

Contact: Brenda Hemstead at the State Cartographer's Office
(Phone) (608)263-4371, (fax) (608)262-5205
Email: hemstead@wisc.edu

Adding data to ControlFinder is easy: simply provide, at minimum, the control point name/id, coordinates, heights, units, datums, accuracy (if available), and metadata (if possible).

The preferred formats are ArcInfo shapefile (.shp), Microsoft Excel (.xls) or MS Access (.mdb), but Comma Separated Volumes (.csv), ASCII text (.txt), or dBASE (.dbf), are also acceptable. The data should be in a column/row layout with fields across the columns and individual records down the rows.

To either submit your data file or if additional assistance is needed, contact Brenda Hemstead at the State Cartographer's Office at (608)263-4371 or email at hemstead@wisc.edu.

Point Name: unique point name assigned by the contributor

Point ID: unique point ID assigned by the contributor

County: control point location

WI-Height Modernization Point: high accuracy vertical control points referenced to the National Spatial Reference System (NSRS).

Horizontal Coordinates & Datum:
- Easting & Northing Coordinates: projected coordinates assigned by the contributor as either county coordinates or state plane coordinates along with the reference datum.
- Geographic Longitude & Latitude Coordinates: latitudes are referenced as positive north and negative south; longitudes are referenced as positive east and negative west along with the reference datum as assigned by the contributor.

Horizontal & Vertical Accuracy:
- local accuracy: a value for a control point that represents the uncertainty in the coordinates of the control point relative to the coordinates of other directly connected, adjacent control points at the 95% confidence level (approximate average of the individual local accuracy values between this control point and other observed control points used to establish the coordinates of the control point)
- network accuracy: a value for a control point that represents the uncertainty in the coordinates of the control point with respect to the geodetic datum at the 95% confidence level.

Heights:
- ellipsoid height: the height of an object above the *reference ellipsoid* in use. These days, this term is generally used to qualify an elevation as being measured from the ellipsoid as opposed to the geoid. GPS systems calculate ellipsoidal height. The geoid height at that location must be subtracted to obtain what is commonly referred to as the elevation.
- orthometric height: refers to the distance measured along the plumb line between the geoid and a point on the Earth's surface, taken positive upward from the geoid.

Suitable for GPS: this field contains either yes or no to describe if the point can be referenced using a GPS device

To Reach: text description of point location

Comments: any additional information about the point, such as condition, monument type, etc.

External Point Information: full url to more information (tie sheet, etc) for a particular point

Dataset Metadata: URL to contributors metadata file fortheir dataset

Dataset Inventory: date the dataset was received from the contributor

Contacts: contact information for the contributor of the data