WhiteStar Introduces SpotOn at GITA Oil & Gas Show

WhiteStar Corp. has introduced SpotOn, a Web-delivered service which enables users to reach out over the Internet to convert a well’s public land survey legal description into a precise geographic coordinate. Users can enter a few well legal descriptions into the Web site to try the service.

“SpotOn determines well locations in real time, adding flexibility and saving an enormous amount of time compared to manual methods or the expense and time delays of using a data vendor,” said Robert White, WhiteStar president and CEO. “The service reduces errors and provides an easy way for oil and gas companies to keep their well locations up-to-date. Often companies change a well’s legal location just before the well is actually drilled and SpotOn provides the means for keeping the company’s mapping systems up-to-date as well as to improve or check the accuracy of existing well location data.”

To obtain an accurate well location, the user enters the well’s “footage call,” “quarter call” or a combination of both. Subscribers will be able to upload and download comma-separated files for batch processing. Using the national Public Land Survey database hosted on the WhiteStar server, SpotOn then reads the description and returns the longitude/latitude coordinate representing the well’s location in terms of either the NAD27 or NAD83 datum.

“We built SpotOn using technology developed over the course of calculating millions of well locations for our oil and gas clients during the past 19 years,” said White. “Well locations can be quite complex, but WhiteStar has developed an extensive rule base to generate latitude/longitude coordinates for any well having a public land survey system legal description.”

Developers will have access to a programming-language independent software API that can easily add SpotOn functionality to new or existing software applications.

The SpotOn product references the WhiteStar Unlimited Grid Access (UGA) product, a seamless digital mosaic of the public land survey grid covering all public land survey states including Alaska, and also incorporating survey data for Texas and the Gulf of Mexico state and federal waters. An UGA subscription is not required to utilize SpotOn as the service automatically references the public land survey on the WhiteStar server via the web.