GPS World

Tag: maps

  • WhiteStar Adds Oil & Gas Pipeline Layer to Basemap Product

    WhiteStar Corp. announced it’s added a new layer of oil and gas pipeline data to its Unlimited Basemap Access (UBA) product. The new WhiteStar Oil & Gas Pipeline Layer will be a nationwide, georeferenced shapefile showing the locations of all lateral and transmission pipelines in the United States.

    The Company said existing subscribers to the WhiteStar UBA product will begin receiving segments of the oil and gas layer at no extra charge with their regular third-quarter UBA update in October. The first segment of the layer will include pipelines in Texas, Oklahoma and the Gulf of Mexico. The layer includes attribute information, such as owner and operator data, for each pipeline.

    WhiteStar said they are creating the new UBA layer primarily from a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) pipeline map that is available in PDF format on the DOE Energy Information Administration’s website (www.eia.doe.gov). A rich source of pipeline information, this map has frustrated hydrocarbon companies for years because it can be downloaded only in a non-GIS compatible PDF format.

    “We’ve converted the PDF to a shapefile and georeferenced it to align with all of the other cultural-feature layers in the UBA product, which is fully GIS compatible,” said WhiteStar President and CEO Robert White. “This new layer allows UBA clients to easily integrate pipeline maps and attribute details into their digital mapping projects.”

    According to the company, the UBA product is a seamless nationwide digital mosaic of basemap information layers from U.S. Census Bureau TIGER Files (with optional TeleAtlas upgrades). Designed for any geospatial mapping project that requires an accurate digital base map, UBA contains 42 layers of cultural features – such as political boundaries, roads, water bodies, and environmentally sensitive areas – that can be ‘cookie cut’ according to a user-selected area of interest and downloaded into most popular digital mapping package.

    WhiteStar said they developed UBA with an interface that lets the user select layers with a few mouse clicks and then delineate the area of interest by choosing a specific county, outlining the project area onscreen or entering its latitude/longitude corner points. UBA users can then export the data into a variety of popular mapping formats, including ESRI, MapInfo, GeoGraphix, Petra, AutoCAD, SMT Kingdom and Golden software. In addition, the data can be projected in either NAD27 or NAD83 coordinate systems, including all related state planes and UTM zones.

    “Our clients use UBA to populate their maps with cultural features for investor presentations, exploration & production logistics planning, infrastructure siting, and permit submissions,” said White. “The new pipeline layer will enable operators to quickly determine which lateral and transmission lines run near their leases.”

    WhiteStar said they will roll out regional segments of the UBA Oil & Gas Pipeline Layer until the seamless nationwide data set is completed. Following delivery of the Texas, Oklahoma, and Gulf Coast segment, WhiteStar will deliver the region of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia that is producing from the Marcellus Shale formation. UBA clients can expect that one to ship in early 2010.
     

  • Sidwell Designing GIS for Oil and Gas Infrastructure Appraiser

    Capitol Appraisal Group Inc. (CAGI) has contracted with the Sidwell Co., asking it to provide a system to inventory, value, and keep track of oil and gas infrastructure and the land parcels on which they are built.

    CAGI provides appraisal and information services to governmental entities primarily for the purpose of property taxation. It contracted with Sidwell after deciding to pursue a geographic information system that would facilitate the collection of field appraisal data.

    This project will be completed in three phases, according to Sidwell and CAGI. The first phase includes review of the typical workflow for field data collection as performed by CAGI technicians, development of a prototype database design, creation of custom forms for ArcPad data capture, and the design and implementation of a system to associate digital camera images directly to records in the ArcPad database.

    Phase Two will consist of refinement of the data capture forms and database design to enhance the data collection workflow, and on-site installation, configuration, testing, and training. Phase Three, the enterprise deployment of the entire system, will include installation and configuration of ESRI’s ArcGIS Server, data loading and tuning, technical consulting, and ArcGIS Server administrator training, according to Sidwell and CAGI.

  • TomTom – Tele Atlas Merger a Done Deal

    Following the announcement that Tele Atlas was making management changes in light of the pending merger, TomTom says that it has completed the merger of digital map supplier Tele Atlas.

    TomTom and Tele Atlas jointly announced Thursday, June 5, that TomTom “declares the recommended public offer for all issued and outstanding shares with a nominal value of €0.10 each in the capital of Tele Atlas unconditional.” TomTom said it will grant shareholders who have not yet tendered their shares under the offer to tender their shares in a post-acceptance period lasting until June 26; these shares are less than 3 percent of the total Tele Atlas shares.

    TomTom has been pursuing a merger with the digital map data supplier for nearly a year, outbidding rival Garmin in the process, in a deal worth approximately €2.9 billion ($4.5 billion). After a lengthy review by European anti-trust officials, TomTom and Tele Atlas received approval for the merger in May.

    Earlier this week the companies announced that during the acceptance period, which ended May 30, some 63,625,232 shares had been tendered for acceptance. Together with the 27,235,651 shares already held by TomTom and 1,685,000 shares to be delivered by Tele Atlas board members, the shares totaled 92,545,883, or 97.48% percent of the total issued and outstanding shares of Tele Atlas capital.

    As soon as legally possible, TomTom intends to remove Tele Atlas’ listings on European financial markets. The company also reiterated that it may initiate any of the reorganization measures as set out in the terms of its offer, which includes the possibility of a squeeze-out procedure.

  • Merrill Lynch Selects HPDI as Oil and Gas Data Provider

    HPDI LLC, a supplier of historical oil and gas data and decision support tools for the energy industry, has been selected by Merrill Lynch to provide its institutional investors with information and research services. As part of a new service called Merrill Open Minds, Merrill Lynch will offer information from industry-specific research companies to assist trading clients in making investment decisions. Of the seven research entities initially chosen to participate by Merrill Lynch, HPDI is the sole provider of energy information.

    “For more than a decade, oil and gas companies have relied on HPDI to provide them with the historical information they need to plan their engineering, marketing, and exploration strategies,” said Corey Rhoden, HPDI chief operating officer. “This same information proves extremely valuable to financial institutions as they evaluate potential investments in the energy sector.”

    HPDI aggregates historical oil and gas production data, drilling permits, prices, transportation, refinery and gas plant information. HPDI makes this information accessible through Internet-based applications that enable clients to query the data and display results in a variety of graphical and tabular formats, including GIS maps, charts, and tables. Clients can use HPDI tools to extrapolate data sets to predict future trends, or they can download the data to other analysis applications.

    “We are very pleased that HPDI is a part of Merrill Open Minds. HPDI offers Merrill Lynch institutional investor clients the depth of coverage and ease of use to support a sophisticated analysis of oil and gas production trends,” said John Svolos, head of Sales and Marketing of Merrill Open Minds.

    The full suite of HPDI products and services will be available to Merrill Lynch clients. All of the HPDI research and analysis tools come with online tutorials designed to allow users to quickly extract and display oil and gas data relating to specific operators, producing formations, activity dates, and geographic areas. HPDI offers its customers access to six primary databases:

    • U.S. Historical Production includes oil and gas production statistics from producing states dating back to the 1950s. This database is continually updated with new state reports.
    • Drilling Permit Database, provided by RigData, includes permit numbers, well and operator information, granted dates and actual images of the permits and plats. This database can be cross-referenced with the U.S. Historical Production data for complex queries with results spotted on a map.
    • Pricing Data contains oil and gas marketing data such as purchaser, producer, and facility information, as well as price and post information.
    • Transporter Database includes oil and gas transporting details such as to/from information, volumes, inventory, and report dates.
    • Refinery and Gas Plant Databases contain receipt and delivery information as well as activity information.

  • Europe Takes Closer Look at Navteq/Nokia Merger

    While European regulatory authorities are closely scrutinizing the proposed TomTom/Tele Atlas merger, they have also turned their eyes to the proposed Navteq/Nokia deal.

    Navteq Corp. said today that the European Commission has initiated a second-phase review of Nokia’s pending acquisition of Navteq. The company stressed in its announcement that this is part of the commission’s review process and does not signal the ultimate outcome. Nevertheless, it is a rare, if not extraordinary step for the commission; in the past 10 years it has only initiated a second-phase review in about 3 percent of European mergers of publicly held companies.

    The Commission now has 90 working days to make a final decision on the transaction. However, the review period may be extended to 125 working days. Such has been the case with the TomTom/Tele Atlas deal, also under a second-phase review. Those two companies are anticipating a commission decision on their merger by May 21.

    Both Navteq and Nokia said they remain committed to their merger plans, noting that the deal has received all the other necessary regulatory approvals, including anti-trust approval in the United States.

    Meanwhile, TomTom said March 27 that it was extending the period of its offer for Tele Atlas. It was clear the European Commission wouldn’t reach a decision by the end of the previous time frame attached to the offer to acquire Tele Atlas for €30 per share, or about €2.9 billion, which would have ended March 31, TomTom said. As result, it has extended its offer to May 30. The Commission originally announced that it was initiating a second-phase review of the merger in November of last year.

  • Schlumberger Acquires Exclusive Distribution Rights to MetaCarta for Oil & Gas Sector

    Schlumberger has announced the acquisition of exclusive distribution rights to the oil and gas sector for MetaCarta‘s map-based geographic information search technologies. Schlumberger will acquire all existing contracts for MetaCarta in the oil and gas sector, resulting in a single source for sales and support of this technology in the industry.

    “MetaCarta is the perfect compliment to expand the Schlumberger industry leadership in information management. With the increasing amount of information held in unstructured form, such as documents, presentations and web content, MetaCarta’s geographically specific access to unstructured content brings new power to petrotechnical professionals,” said Olivier Le Peuch, president, Schlumberger Information Solutions (SIS). “In combination with our geoscience and engineering information management solutions, now petrotechnical professionals will be able to rapidly incorporate all available information that is relevant to their prospect or field.”

    MetaCarta search technology combines map-driven geographic search, geographic referencing, temporal filtering and data visualization capabilities, for both structured and unstructured content, making that content “location-aware.” This enables geoscientists and engineers to find and display relevant data in the context of their area of interest.

    “The Schlumberger global sales and support organization will accelerate the expansion of MetaCarta solutions in the oil and gas industry,” said Ron Matros, president and chief executive officer, MetaCarta. “We look forward to bringing geographically relevant data search capabilities to a broader set of customers across the globe.”

  • TomTom-Tele Atlas Merger Falls Under Scrutiny

    The European Commission (EC) is taking a closer look at TomTom’s planned acquisition of TeleAtlas; it looks as if it might have a tough European road to hoe.  The EC only initiates a second review in about 3 percent of the mergers it reviews, so it’s a bit of an extraordinary step. The probe will examine whether the deal would push up the price of digital maps for rival portable navigation device makers or limit their access to these maps, the EC said. It set an April 17 deadline for the probe to end.

    TomTom and Tele Atlas said in a joint statement they expect to have a clearer idea about whether the deal can go through by early next year. TomTom extended its offer for Tele Atlas shares until March 31, assuming it would know the outcome of the probe by then.

  • Navteq Schedules Stockholder Vote on Nokia Merger

    Navteq Corp. said Monday that it has scheduled a special meeting of stockholders next month to consider approval of the previously announced merger agreement between the company and Nokia.

    Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia and digital map supplier Navteq first announced on October 1 that they had reached a definitive merger agreement to the tune of $8.1 billion (€5.7 billion). In the meantime, PND rivals Garmin and TomTom became involved in a bidding war over Tele Atlas, a Navteq competitor.

    Navteq stockholders of record at the close of business on November 13, 2007, are entitled to notice of the special meeting and to vote on the adoption of the merger agreement, according to the company. The special meeting will be held on December 12 in Chicago. Proxy statements and the accompanying proxy card were mailed to Navteq stockholders earlier this month, the company said.

    Completion of the merger is subject to the adoption of the merger agreement by Navteq stockholders at the special meeting and the satisfaction of the other closing conditions set forth in the merger agreement. Navteq currently expects to complete the proposed merger in Q1 of next year.

  • 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.

  • MetaCarta to Provide the Oil and Gas Industry with Geographically Relevant Data

    MetaCarta, Inc., has announced an agreement with IHS Inc., a global provider of critical technical information, decision-support tools, and related services, to enhance MetaCarta’s Energy Geographic Data Module to provide information when searching for energy-related information specific to a location. Specifically, geologists and other E&P analysts using MetaCarta Geographic Text Search (GTS) and GTS geOdrive solutions will now be able to search for information such as blocks, licenses, oil fields, wells and basins found in IHS databases using the just-released MetaCarta IHS Global Oil & Gas GDM.

    IHS is a leading global provider of a broad range of aggregated, structured data used by the energy industry to study potential and existing oil and gas (O&G) reserves, as well as the transportation, contractual, competitive and other above-ground factors involved in bringing reserves to market. With the world’s most complete databases on wells, fields and other O&G entities, as well as geographic coordinates for these data types, IHS is the ideal choice to provide MetaCarta with a reference source to help guide smart-indexing of the vast amounts of unstructured data oil companies maintain and strive to fully leverage.

    MetaCarta GDMs are knowledge bases used to identify and disambiguate geographic references, assign latitude and longitude coordinates. GDMs contain natural language processing (NLP) logic, which is used to recognize the jargons and data types that represent geographic entities, disambiguate names, and establish greater geoconfidence and georelevance.

    “The alliance with IHS has allowed MetaCarta to develop an energy industry specific GDM utilizing the rich global knowledgebase of IHS,” said Ron Matros, president and CEO of MetaCarta. “Having the most accurate and comprehensive source of E&P information available with our search tools will allow our customers to more accurately pinpoint and collect location-specific information. Helping them get the information they need more quickly is critical to their business, particularly when they are making billion dollar decisions.”

    The Energy GDM is used with MetaCarta Geographic Text Search (GTS) as well as GTS geOdrive and contains thousands of place names, reference formats, and usage statistics particular to the energy industry. These include wells, blocks, MMS areas, oil and gas fields, basins, geologic provinces, and assorted other oil and gas features.

    “Energy companies face a tremendous knowledge-management challenge in order to take full advantage of the accumulated insights across their respective companies that relate to a particular geologic province, an individual well or other asset,” said Timothy Hopkins, vice president of Strategic Marketing at IHS. “With the MetaCarta offering, IHS customers will have the ability to search unstructured data, ranging from the proprietary archives of a retired, 30-year veteran geologist to the latest public press release on an emerging field, and choose from a list of geographically verified matching results. We think oil and gas companies will be delighted with this alliance and the added value it brings.”

  • Blue Marble Offers Applied Geodesy Training in Houston After the GIS for Oil and Gas Show

    September 9, 2006 — Blue Marble Geographics will be offering applied geodesy training in their Geographic Calculator class after the GIS for Oil and Gas Conference on Friday, September 22, 2006. The day-long session is an in-depth training course using the Geographic Calculator, a flexible data-conversion application.

    The course also features education on the basics of geodesy and mapping. Blue Marble will also be exhibiting at the Geographic Information & Technology Association GIS for Oil and Gas Conference at booth number 502.

    The Geographic Calculator converts individual coordinates, point database files, and vector map files from virtually any coordinate system to any other. Users can transform between coordinate systems, calculate the distance and azimuth between two coordinates, and calculate new coordinates at a known distance and azimuth from known coordinates. The Geographic Calculator also automatically computes grid convergence, point scale factor, datum shifts, and grid shifts.

    Call toll free 800-616-2725 to reserve a spot in the class.