Turning 150-year-old hand-drawn survey plats into GIS polygons so mineral rights attorneys stop billing $800/hr to squint at microfilm
CadasterGhost is an early-stage prototype exploring automated conversion of historical land records — scanned GLO survey plats, patent certificates, and metes-and-bounds descriptions — into GIS-ready polygon layers with chain-of-title linkage. It's aimed at title insurers, energy company land departments, and county assessors who currently spend weeks untangling century-old land splits by hand.
- Ingests scanned document images from GLO surveys, patent certificates, and county recorder archives dating to the 1840s
- OCR pipeline tuned for degraded iron gall ink, 19th century cursive handwriting, and inconsistent historical township numbering schemes
- Parses metes-and-bounds descriptions and translates them into georeferenced polygon geometries
- Links output polygons to source documents to support chain-of-title tracing
- Exports layers in standard GIS formats for downstream use in mapping and title workflows
None yet.
The core pipeline is a document ingestion and OCR layer feeding into a geometry construction module that interprets parsed legal descriptions as spatial features. Output is written to GIS-compatible formats. The project is structured as a single-application prototype; no distributed infrastructure or external data services are wired up at this stage.
🧪 Early prototype / concept. Not production-ready.
MIT