Welcome to the WhiteStar blog. We’re excited about this means of communication and hope to make it a useful and interesting resource for you as regards a variety of technologies and data in the oil and gas industry. Each member of the WhiteStar team will be posting periodically on a variety of topics. Stay tuned and enjoy! - Robert White, CEO

In line with trying to be a bit of a resource, I put together this email focused on the lack of understanding revolving around the use of shape files.

If you’re using shape files for Petra, Geographix or SMT please read on. If you’re using ArcGIS, please disregard.

The best advice I can give here is use the right format for your software. Choose a true well spotting grid that enables you to calculate from footages or quarter calls. Build a truly accurate map for your native software that labels properly and displays properly. It is a lot harder (and impossible in some cases) to do the above using a shape file.

If you make maps and understand the facts about your data. These should include the source, finding out who maintains and creates the data, and the accuracy and precision.

As the Crocodile Hunter would say, “You should always know and respect the environment you are working within”.

If you don’t know the answer, give me a call on 303-781-5182 and I’ll try and help you out.

Cheers,

Anthony

Below is a resource on how to load WhiteStar Texas survey data into seperate layers within Petra. It’s an easy and seamless process, but it is important that its done right.

As you know, our Texas survey data includes the following (obviously loaded into Petra as seperate layers - but in one file);

• Abstracts
• Surveys
• Blocks
• Lots
• Tracts
• Sub-divisions
• Overlapping parts

So here’s what you do -

1. Start Petra and open an existing project, or create a new one.

2. Load well data for project, or set up project extents manually.

3. From Petra Main Menu, open the Mapping Module.

4. From the Mapping Module execute Overlay -> Load -> Import

A dialog box will open and should be filled out. You will need to substitute the file name to match your order.

Note: Petra loads data onto the ‘LANDGRID’ layer by default. You can change the layer using the ‘Load Into Layer’ drop-down menu, or use the ‘Translate’ tab on the ‘Import Cartographic Data’ dialog box. Using the ‘Translate’ tab is the most preferred method. It divides the survey up into specific layers upon import. The translation file uses Petra layers 20-55.

5. Click on the ‘Translate’ tab on the ‘Import Cartographic Data’ dialog box. A dialog box like the one below will open. Be sure to put a check in the ‘Use Entity Code Translation’ and browse to the file named: Texas_Survey.dat

6. Click the ‘Import’ button

7. Click the ‘OK’ button

• What are the coverages, scales, source documents, and maintenance associated with the free data? Is it disclosed anywhere on the site?
• Are the data in the right format? Very few sites produce data in a format that gets the most out of Petra, for instance.
• With any data set, it’s important to understand something about the quality of the dataset. This might seem obvious, but much of the time free data is put out on the Internet without accompanying metadata (data about the data).
• Will you have to tile the pieces together?
• How do you update the tiles or data set?
• What coordinate system do the data use? Do you know enough about this subject or this dataset to integrate this data set successfully with other data sets?
• Different organizations produce data for different reasons, and those reasons might not be yours. The Census Bureau, for example, creates lots of data, but they want to count people. They may not care about how many points are added to a stream in rural Utah, for instance, but you might care a lot because of your stream drainage study.
• Just because a data structure has a lot of places for information to go does not mean the structure is actually populated with data! For example, if you’re doing a well study involving bottom hole temperatures, and only
• Whether the data are free or from a vendor, someone has to “know” the process to download it and “own that process”. Should that be an extra job responsibility of yours, to become an amateur IT volunteer?
• If you aren’t the unpaid IT volunteer in your company, then who is? As data sets accumulate, someone will have to manage all that stuff.

Digital data, without any further information, has no sense of its origin. If you get a computer file from someone, ask yourself these questions:

• If I have a question about the quality of the data, are there original documents I can go back to to see how the data were captured?
• If I make a change on my side, is there a process for getting the changes back to the originators of the data? How is this documented?
• Is my product considered a standard in the industry?

WhiteStar’s Public Land Survey is digitized from USGS 1:24,000 series topographic maps using a highly accurate spatial averaging digitizing technique, which captures corner boundaries to +/- 40 foot accuracies. The Wyoming resurveys are included and Carter townships are used for Kentucky and Tennessee.