HOUSTON — (BUSINESS WIRE) — August 6, 2014 — LandWorks Inc., a developer of innovative land management solutions, has enhanced its Web AutoMapper online service that converts land legal descriptions into GIS-ready map polygons. Clients can now have their property polygons displayed on the backdrop of the WhiteStar Grid, with the option of buying grid townships encompassing the mapped property.

For about 20 percent of the cost of manual mapping, Web AutoMapper has simplified land records mapping in the oil & gas, renewable energy, mining, banking, utility, pipeline, state/local government, telecommunications, transportation, water and real estate sectors. The cost to map a legal description with Web AutoMapper is $2 per polygon with the WhiteStar Grid offered at just $10 per PLSS township.

“LandWorks selected the WhiteStar Grid for inclusion in Web AutoMapper because it is the best basemap available for any industry or profession to use in mapping property legal descriptions,” said LandWorks President Jerry Bramwell. “An important benefit of the WhiteStar Grid is that its data layers are continuously updated.”

The industry standard land grid for North America, the WhiteStar Grid is a seamless digital mosaic of data layers which was initially hand-digitized from 1:24,000-scale USGS topographic maps. Its layers, which can be switched on and off, include basic survey information such as section, township, range, meridian, and geographic (latitude/longitude) coordinates, as well as the dates when attributes were last updated. WhiteStar is dedicated to continuously updating the grid as more accurate survey data becomes available.

“The WhiteStar data provides the tie between a legal description and the geography of that parcel of land,” said WhiteStar CEO Robert White. “Producing polygons this way allows you to get your land positions on a map for critical analysis using the GIS.”

The WhiteStar Grid is now available through Web AutoMapper, which LandWorks introduced in 2013 as an inexpensive, fast and easy method of processing many types of standard property descriptions and converting them into digital map polygons.

A customer simply logs onto Web AutoMapper at www.LandWorks.com/automapper and creates an account. The user then submits an Excel spreadsheet containing one or hundreds of legal descriptions in Jeffersonian Township/Range, Texas Survey/Abstract, or Tax Parcel number formats. Within seconds, Web AutoMapper provides an onscreen report detailing which polygons can be generated and which cannot.

If the customer decides to proceed, a credit card is provided, and once payment is made, Web AutoMapper displays the mapped polygons aligned to the WhiteStar Grid. For customers who don’t already own the Grid, they have the option of buying it by the township along with their mapped polygons. Clients can purchase just those townships immediately surrounding their polygon or select a buffer to include other townships within a specified distance of their mapped property.

Web AutoMapper generates a zip file of the purchased polygons and WhiteStar Grid townships in either Esri shapefile or file geodatabase format in NAD 83 or 27 for direct download into Esri ArcGIS software as well as other popular mapping systems such as IHS Petra, IHS Kingdom and LMKR GeoGraphix.

As a Cloud-based application, Web AutoMapper brings the full power of the standalone LandWorks AutoMapper software to every level of digital map user via the Internet. Introduced in 2002, the onsite AutoMapper package is purchased by an organization and sits behind their firewall as a production-grade GIS mapping tool. The software is used extensively by organizations that must manage large tracts of land and keep property records up to date, such as local governments, energy companies and natural resource management entities.

About Landworks, Inc. ( www.landworks.com)

LandWorks, an ESRI Gold Business Partner, provides software and services utilizing ESRI ® GIS technology. Since 1995, the company’s primary focus has been providing software products and services for managing any type of land right in any industry including oil and gas, mining, pipelines, telecommunications, electric/gas utilities, wind energy, transportation and water. With offices in Houston, TX and Denver, CO, LandWorks offers a full line of land-related digitizing and data conversion services.

LandWorks
Jerry Bramwell, 713-334-3030 ext. 101