We are Thankful for GIS Data Editors

This Thanksgiving, we give a shout out to the GIS data editors around the world who spend countless hours editing and correcting data so that data analytics can work. It is said that 80% of time, effort and budget is spent on acquiring and maintaining data. We see every reason to believe in this old chestnut. As for ourselves, we devote considerable time and resources to editing and data merging tasks to streamline data usage for our customers.

Map database production often involves merging data from different sources. Each authoritative source (state, county, local or private company) produces data to serve specific purposes which may not align with each other in terms of update intervals, purpose, scale, detail, content, quality or topology. Data stewards can’t manage edge matching to other datasets, so it is left to value-add data companies such as WhiteStar to figure out solutions and workflows. Sometimes data must also be conflated among spatial layers to ensure that county lines, for example, correlate to township lines wherever that is appropriate. The data will be misaligned without intervention.

The figure below shows Texas onshore and offshore pipelines transitioning to federal waters. The data stewards for these two datasets include multiple governmental agencies, multiple state and one federal. Data curation for this data layer, part of WhiteStar Culture® involves removing redundant pipeline geometry and making sure the endpoints from the federal data match the state data.

WhiteStar also adjusts topology, adds additional attributes such as section-township-range and date stamps to each of the more than 30 million land parcels that we manage quarterly.

Robert C. White, Jr.
President and CEO
WhiteStar Corporation