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Civil Engineering & Construction vocabulary · Surveying and Setting Out

Datum

Meaning in civil engineering & construction, with examples

/ˈdeɪtəm/nounAdvanced term

In civil engineering & construction, datum means: A reference level or surface from which heights or positions are measured, such as mean sea level or a chosen site datum of 100.000 m.

In Turkish: referans kotu, referans düzlemi, datum

How it is used

Drawings state which datum their levels refer to. Mixing up two datums, for example the national datum and a site datum, is a classic cause of setting-out errors.

Example sentences

  1. All levels on these drawings are relative to site datum, not sea level.

  2. The bridge team used a different datum, so their levels were 0.35 m out.

Common collocations

  • site datum
  • national datum
  • datum level
  • vertical datum
  • relative to datum
  • benchmarkA fixed point on or near the site whose height is accurately known and which is used as the reference for measuring all other levels.
  • levelThe height of a point above a fixed reference, such as a site benchmark or sea level. It is also the name of the instrument surveyors use to measure heights.
  • surveyThe work of measuring and recording the position, height and shape of land, buildings or other features, or the report and drawings that result from it.
  • GNSSGlobal Navigation Satellite System: the general name for satellite positioning systems such as GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou, used to find exact positions on the ground.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Surveying and Setting Out

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