Presented by Robert C. White, President of Whitestar Corporation at the FME User Meeting in Denver, CO, April 16, 2012. Abstract: Does your land mapping procedure remind you of the Temple of Doom? This presentation will focus on how we used FME Desktop to take textual land/legal descriptions from the State of North Dakota and transform them into real world polygons to analyze opportunities. This technique would work for any of the 30 US states using the Public Land Survey System.

1. Magically Transform Legal
Descriptions to Land Maps!!!
Robert C. White, Jr.
President – WhiteStar Corporation
April 16, 2012

2. ND Lease Sale
 Legal Descriptions Come from Many Places
 Mapped to Determine Opportunity
 FME is the perfect tool for integrating workflows.

3. ND Land Sale

4. Extract PDF to Text
 Found a tool that allows formatting of the data to
be preserved.
 There are many tools, this one works pretty well.

5. The Mission
 Map the quarterly ND Lease Sale
 Convert PDF to Text
 Run legal.fmw – Ties to Cloud
 Map Individual Polys inside Legal2map.com
 Analyze Results inside ArcGIS
 Next Steps

6. Magically Edited to Look Like
Prov Leaseno Twp Rng Sec Legal Acres
M 12-00001 137 100 2 SW/4 160
M 12-00002 137 100 8 NE/4 80
M 12-00003 137 100 8 E/2NW/4 80
M 12-00004 137 100 8 E/2SW/4 80
M 12-00005 137 100 11 NE/4 80
M 12-00006 137 100 11 NW/4 80
M 12-00007 137 100 12 NE/4 80
M 12-00008 137 100 12 E/2NW/4 40
M 12-00009 137 100 13 NW/4 80
M 12-00010 137 100 16 NE/4 160
M 12-00011 137 100 16 NW/4 160
M 12-00012 137 100 16 SE/4 158
M 12-00013 137 100 16 SW/4 80
M 12-00014 137 100 25 NE/4 80
M 12-00015 137 100 25 NW/4 80
M 12-00016 137 100 36 NE/4 160
M 12-00017 137 100 36 NW/4 160
M 12-00018 137 100 36 SE/4 160
M 12-00019 137 100 36 SW/4 160
M 12-00020 137 101 16 NE/4 160
M 12-00021 137 101 16 NW/4 160
M 12-00022 137 101 16 SE/4 160
M 12-00023 137 101 16 SW/4 160
M 12-00024 137 101 30 NE/4 80
M 12-00025 137 101 30 E/2NW/4, NENE,NWNE 78.23
M 12-00027 137 101 36 NW/4 160
M 12-00028 137 101 36 SE/4 160
M 12-00029 137 101 36 SW/4 160

7. Workbench Details

8. Guts of WS Leasebuilder

9. Syntax of Legal Descriptions

10. Lease Map Results

11. Next Steps
 Lot and Tract Lookup
 Geometry
 Tabular (Approximate)
 Build lot data for rest of country!
 Produce more accurate polygons referencing lots.

12. Review
 Map Legal Descriptions Anywhere in the USA
 Convert PDF to Text
 Run legal.fmw – Leasemapper has data in cloud.
 Review Syntax – Legal2map.com
 Analyze Results inside ArcGIS
 Next Steps

13. Thank You!
 Questions?
 For more information:
 Robert White, rwhite@whitestar.com
 WhiteStar Corporation
 ND LAND SALE:
http://www.land.nd.gov/minerals/Docs/201205sale
list.pdf