Lakewood, Colo., 17 July 2008 – WhiteStar Corp. today unveiled its Enhanced Unlimited Grid Access (UGA) mapping product, which supplements the Standard UGA map database by filling in land boundary gaps in the U.S. Public Land Survey. WhiteStar will offer new and renewed subscriptions to Enhanced UGA at the original Standard UGA rate until Sept. 30, 2008.
WhiteStar introduced UGA in 2006 to provide mapping speed and flexibility to oil & gas, pipeline, utility, forestry and insurance companies that have infrastructure operations covering a few square miles or an entire region. The Standard UGA provides a seamless digital mosaic of land survey and fitted state and county boundaries covering all public land survey states, including Texas and Offshore State and Federal Water in the Gulf of Mexico. WhiteStar created the UGA database product manually by digitizing 1:24,000-scale USGS topographic maps. It is delivered on DVDs as a nationwide database so that clients have complete U.S. coverage on their desktops at all times.
WhiteStar developed the new Enhanced UGA at the request of clients from the energy industry with extensive operations in western states, where gaps exist in the Public Land Survey.
“When the Public Land Survey was established, it excluded national parks, wildlife refuges and other existing land grants that had already been deeded,” said WhiteStar CEO Robert White. “This created holes in the land survey grid, which causes mapping problems in many western states.”
To rectify this situation, WhiteStar produced the Enhanced UGA database product by filling in the grid gaps with township/section/range boundaries from other data sources. For many western states, including Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, WhiteStar has obtained the additional data from the Geodetic Cadastral Database (GCDB) developed and maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
For California, WhiteStar has filled in land survey gaps with data from the California Division of Oil & Gas. Marshland areas in Louisiana that are considered neither on- nor offshore have been included in Cambe survey maps, which WhiteStar has acquired to supplement that section of the UGA grid.
Before the end of 2008, WhiteStar plans to include Utah and Nevada in the Enhanced UGA offering. Also scheduled for inclusion are Montana, Arizona, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.
New pricing for Enhanced UGA will go into effect on Oct. 1, 2008, but WhiteStar is offering both new and renewed subscriptions at the original UGA rate of $500 per month, or $6000 per year, if the order is placed by September 30. For renewals, the special rate applies regardless of the renewal date. Starting on Oct. 1, the price of the Enhanced UGA product will be $750 per month, or $9000 per year.
UGA is one of several nationwide 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.
WhiteStar includes regular quarterly updates as part of the UGA product and eliminates costly customer data management problems. Instead of trying to track the vintage and the location of “postage-stamp-sized areas” of previously purchased datasets, the customer has all of the latest update information for the nation available right at their fingertips. Liberal WhiteStar licensing policies for all WhiteStar products and services allow for data interchange among business partners, and licenses are available for posting the data on internet or intranet web sites.
For details on an UGA subscription, call WhiteStar Customer Service at 1-800-736-MAPS. Ask for Anthony Ford.
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.