The effective functioning of utility assets is crucial to modern society. Utility companies building and maintaining these structures must comb through an extensive corpus of new and historical data to make informed decisions. The foundational geospatial data, however, is still analog in nature and often linked to antiquated workflows, which leads them to spend significant time cleaning and contextualizing data to gain actionable insights. This is costly, making data more of a liability than an asset.

A GIS and data infrastructure specialist, Whitestar, is well-positioned to solve these data-related challenges in the utility space. It’s a multi-industry player focused on data management and location intelligence. Operating in the space for over three decades, Whitestar holds the pre-eminent dataset with hundreds of attributes across a range of categories, including: land grids, cartographic data library, infrastructure, and oil and gas wells. These data sets are aggregated, cleansed, and fed into its flagship product, Whitestar Explorer, which helps utility companies improve location intelligence by building a high-fidelity GIS data fabric into a digital workflow. It generates a wide variety of maps and tables for crucial decision-making regarding land acquisition, taxes, property development, and management.

“Our platform is structured to give clients access to consistent datasets nationwide. It enables them to operate cohesively and get the same result every time they run internal analytics scripts against our datasets, whether python or FME scripts for every county and state line,” says Steve Pickett, Lead Client Service Partner of Whitestar.

Whitestar Explorer is a geographically referenced inventory comprising proprietary data layers, including TrueGRID, CultureHD, ParcelsHD, WellsHD, and TruePOLYGON, capable of taking any land description from any source and digitally converting it into a polygon on a map. It successfully eliminates the discrepancies in digitizing and interpreting vast amounts of historical information, from 200 to 300 years to recent ownership changes in land parcel acquisitions. This information is crucial for large land-holding conglomerates and utility companies to appropriately plan new infrastructure or manage existing, using modern digital analytics.

For example, a utility company planning to add a new sustainable energy asset, like a solar farm or 10 wind turbines, can gain access +550 data attributes across all data layers to gain a full-picture view and mitigate the risk in their endeavor. The platform effectively cuts down time spent on writing internal scripts to interpret, analyze, digitize, and map data from different survey systems and legal descriptions. GIS teams can effortlessly map their instruments—an oil and gas mineral lease or right-of-way description—against other attributes using the databases and define the polygons. Updating the entire database every quarter, Whitestar ensures clients can always gain the benefit of the latest maps.