Whitestar
Augmenting Land-Related Business Decisions

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.

“Renewable developers can utilize all data layers to filter out unfitting parcels during the site selection process, then our clients appropriately ascertain acreage and landowner information to avoid the possibilities of over or underpaying taxes, because we deliver clean and contextualized data.” says Dan O’Connor, CEO of Whitestar.

The platform also enables users to query and use advanced analytics on top of high-fidelity data, allowing them to accurately build land positions and determine other tangible business benefits, like identifying collaboration opportunities with nearby utility service providers.

Besides providing services from an open-source perspective, Whitestar has a long-standing relationship with ESRI. It has added features in TruePOLYGON to quickly add land parcels in ArcGIS Pro, the core offering of ESRI.

We uncover opportunities to provide our customers with a solution that reduces costs over time, adjusting our strategy as needed to fit different locations and needs

A recent success story illustrates Whitestar’s value proposition. Kensington Gas and Electric company (Renamed to deidentify), an American investor-owned utility (IOU) with publicly-traded stocks, collaborated with it to completely digitize their manual, error-prone process of hand-mapping legal land descriptions. This enabled them to improve the efficacy of their analysis before land acquisition. In addition to enhancing informed decision-making, the management gained the ability to effectively track and share location data accurately while reducing troubleshooting time and maintenance crew efforts.

The immense value proposition of Whitestar has been validated in numerous client testimonials. A lean team of highly skilled GIS professionals, developers, and data mapping experts is the force behind its success. The seamless mix of high-fidelity, multi-layer data, comprehensive and up-to-date databases, and robust cloud computing software makes Whitestar an ideal GIS partner for companies in the utility space.