For this Company Spotlight, we interviewed Whitestar’s Director (Dan O’Connor) and VP of Business Development (Mark Woloszyk) about the company’s land mapping software. Whitestar is a provider of infrastructure planning data and software mapping products focused on helping oil & gas, utility, telecommunications, renewables, forestry, railways, and mining companies digitize and spatialize land data records. For more information on Whitestar, please visit whitestar.com.

Background: Founded in 1990, Whitestar initially offered data management consultancy services related to geographic information systems (GIS), such as data clean up, transition, etc. In 1999, Whitestar acquired Platte River Digital Cartography and began developing a subscription-based GIS data product offering. Today, the company serves a diverse customer base across numerous industries that have been loyal users of Whitestar’s platform for an average of 10+ years.

Value Proposition: Whitestar’s combination of comprehensive GIS data and a cloud-based software platform help its customers realize the following benefits:

High Accuracy: Whitestar’s base map data was hand-curated and has been refined over its 30-year operating history to create a much more accurate foundational GIS data layer versus competing solutions that rely on software algorithms, which can lead to errors.
Multiple Layers of Data: Building on top of its base map layer, Whitestar provides more than 500 vector layers (e.g.,Contours, topography, roads, national parks, forests, railways, well data, land ownership etc.) across 3,100+ counties in the U.S., enabling its customers to access all information required to complete any geospatial mapping project.
Powerful Automations: Whitestar’s advanced document recognition technologies allow land documents to be rapidly imported and transformed from text to a digital polygon with several attributes of metadata that is mapped to a GIS database, creating an “easy button” for clean, accurate GIS data management.
Ease of Use: Customers can effortlessly access Whitestar’s platform through its streaming services, cloud web-based user interface, or mobile applications. Further, integrations are readily available that seamlessly link Whitestar’s offering to commonly used GIS platforms, such as Esri.

Use Cases: Customers across the oil & gas, utility, telecommunications, renewables, forestry, railway, and mining industries utilize Whitestar’s platform to address the following workflows:

Land Acquisition: The platform’s ability to apply complex filtering to land searches enables its customers to quickly identify the most optimal areas of land for their specific requirements.
Asset Management: For companies that own large portfolios of real estate, Whitestar helps them better understand the exact size and location of specific land tracts, which enables the company to estimate respective taxes and royalty payments accurately and reliably.
Environmental Compliance: Customers can easily verify which areas permit for certain types of operations, so that they can ensure they are not in violation of any environmental regulations.
Operations Optimization: When considering the best approach to upgrading existing infrastructure, Whitestar’s platform can quickly help determine where upgrades would be most effective to maximize return on that investment.

Closing Thoughts: As additional infrastructure will continue to be built to support increasing data and energy demands, companies will need to be able to efficiently identify optimal and accessible locations. We look forward to following Whitestar, as it continues to broaden its scope across more industries and more features (e.g., underground and aerial).

Company Spotlights

May 2022