LandWorks, a developer of innovative land management solutions, has enhanced its Web AutoMapper online service that converts land legal descriptions into GIS-ready map polygons. Clients can now have their property polygons displayed on the backdrop of the WhiteStar Grid, with the option of buying grid townships encompassing the mapped property.
For about 20 percent of the cost of manual mapping, Web AutoMapper has simplified land records mapping in the oil & gas, renewable energy, mining, banking, utility, pipeline, state/local government, telecommunications, transportation, water and real estate sectors. The cost to map a legal description with Web AutoMapper is USD2 per polygon with the WhiteStar Grid offered at just USD10 per PLSS township.
LandWorks selected the WhiteStar Grid for inclusion in Web AutoMapper because it is the best basemap available for any industry or profession to use in mapping property legal descriptions, said LandWorks president Jerry Bramwell. An important benefit of the WhiteStar Grid is that its data layers are continuously updated.
Data layers
The industry standard land grid for North America, the WhiteStar Grid is a seamless digital mosaic of data layers which was initially hand-digitized from 1:24,000-scale USGS topographic maps. Its layers, which can be switched on and off, include basic survey information such as section, township, range, meridian, and geographic (latitude/longitude) coordinates, as well as the dates when attributes were last updated. WhiteStar is dedicated to continuously updating the grid as more accurate survey data becomes available.
The WhiteStar data provides the tie between a legal description and the geography of that parcel of land, said WhiteStar CEO Robert White. Producing polygons this way enables the use of GIS to get land positions on a map for critical analysis, he added.
The WhiteStar Grid is now available through Web AutoMapper, which LandWorks introduced in 2013 as an inexpensive, fast and easy method of processing many types of standard property descriptions and converting them into digital map polygons.
Source: GIM International