Lakewood, Colo., 29 May 2008 – WhiteStar Corp., a supplier of digital cartographic data and services to the energy industry, will demonstrate its custom digital elevation models (DEMs) and ‘Unlimited Access’ mapping products as well as its PolyBuilder™ web service next week at the WindPower 2008 Conference in Houston.
WindPower 2008 is the largest conference and exhibition of the wind energy industry in North America (www.awea.org). The show is expected to draw more than 9,000 attendees and 750 exhibitors to Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center on June 1-4, 2008. WhiteStar will be exhibiting in booth #3444.
“The WhiteStar Unlimited Grid Access (UGA), custom DEMs and PolyBuilder service are the mapping products we provide most often to wind energy companies,” said WhiteStar CEO Robert White. “Wind energy companies integrate these mapping products and solutions to determine where the best leases are to build wind turbines and other energy generation facilities.”
WhiteStar creates custom DEMs from the 10-meter USGS elevation database and delivers them in export files that can easily be uploaded into the computerized wind modeling packages used by alternative energy companies. When loaded with accurate elevation data, these software models help pinpoint where topographic features are most conducive to steady, high-velocity wind conditions.
The WhiteStar UGA product is a seamless digital mosaic of the public land survey grid covering the entire United States, including Texas and Gulf of Mexico federal waters. WhiteStar developed UGA from 1:24,000-scale USGS topographic maps to provide flexibility to energy companies for mapping projects that span a few square miles or cover the entire nation. UGA is available as a subscription product with quarterly updates.
Wind energy companies use WhiteStar’s UGA database to perform the property ownership research necessary to buy or lease land where wind turbines will be placed. They can then use the WhiteStar PolyBuilder web service to define the boundaries of the lease – in a matter of minutes. It allows a user to easily calculate the geographic points representing a land polygon by entering the legal land description of a region or property within the U.S. Public Land Survey System.
The output is a list of geographic points in either latitude/longitude or state plane coordinates that define the boundaries of the land area. PolyBuilder users can specify multiple regions for the same description, and the web-based application will calculate and return the combined results with as few distinct polygons as possible, for optimal simplicity. Any application with internet access and proper entitlement can use the service.
Because the PolyBuilder, DEMs and UGA products are all developed by WhiteStar, the data sets align perfectly and ensure the accuracy of every mapping project built on top of them.
UGA is one of several nationwide ‘Unlimited Access’ subscription map database products offered by WhiteStar. The others are Unlimited Basemap Access (UBA) and Unlimited Well Access (UWA). Each product includes built-in functionality that allows users to cookie cut their area of interest in any shape or size from the appropriate map data layers and export the data to nearly any commercial GIS-based mapping application. Liberal WhiteStar licensing policies for all WhiteStar products and services support external consultants for use in their projects, and licenses are available for posting the data on internet or intranet web sites.
The WhiteStar Unlimited Access products have recently been offered as Enterprise products based on the popular ESRI ArcGIS Server database.
About WhiteStar Corp.
Headquartered in Lakewood, Colorado, WhiteStar Corp. has supplied digital cartographic data products, services and consulting since 1990 to the oil and gas, pipeline, natural resource, and engineering industries. As a purveyor of geospatial data products, WhiteStar takes a customized approach to every implementation project. The WhiteStar client base now includes more than 1600 companies ranging in size from local consulting firms to integrated multi-national corporations. Learn more at www.whitestar.com.