Lakewood, Colo., 16 April 2009 – WhiteStar Corp. has added eight more states to the optional ‘UGA Plus’ upgrade layer built on top of its Unlimited Grid Access (UGA) product. Available only from WhiteStar, the UGA Plus upgrade uses Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and other state map data sources to supplement Township and Range data not included on original hardcopy USGS topographic maps either because the areas were not surveyed when the maps were made or because they were part of a land grant.
UGA Plus was released for Wyoming earlier this year. Today, WhiteStar introduced UGA Plus for California, Colorado, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah. UGA Plus must be ordered separately from the original UGA subscription. New UGA subscribers may purchase the UGA Plus as an optional premium upgrade during ordering.
WhiteStar created the UGA Plus layer with integrated map data from sources such as the BLM and added value to the government data by cleaning it up. This data massaging ensures that no land ‘slivers’ or ‘overlaps’ will be left between lease boundaries on the maps created with the UGA Plus product. Users of GIS software will be especially relieved that WhiteStar has topologically enhanced the data to eliminate the problem with slivers between polygons that can result when trying to map leases in a GIS software package.
“By filling in data gaps, UGA Plus makes it possible to create seamless nationwide land grid maps with no blank spots or overlaps across state boundaries,” said WhiteStar President Robert White.
Every UGA Plus product will include both the standard USGS grid and the BLM grid, allowing clients to toggle back and forth between data layers, as needed. All of the data manipulation functionality found in the standard UGA product is fully available in the UGA Plus version. The UGA Plus layer includes all of the states named here and any added in the future.
“The beauty of the original UGA product is that it will precisely overlay the topographic source maps, which is a long-standing and expected standard in the oil and gas industry,” added White.
In addition, WhiteStar has introduced a new version of UGA Plus called ‘UGA Plus Lots and Tracts.’ Currently offered for Wyoming, UGA Plus Lots and Tracts fills in the township and section information with lot and tract data from Bureau of Land Management maps.
“Any organization that is mapping land leases – such as government agencies, oil and gas companies, pipeline operators, utilities and alternative energy firms – will benefit from the greater level of detail provided by supplementary township and range data and lot and tract information in Wyoming,” said WhiteStar President Robert White.
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 as well as Federal Offshore for the Atlantic and Pacific. 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.
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 or the cost of upgrading to UGA Plus, call WhiteStar Customer Service at 1-800-736-MAPS. Ask for Steve Pickett.
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.