

Using an origin at the centroid of the polygon I found the vertex in each quadrant that is farthest from the origin. Finding the corners of a polygon can be tricky - a polygon often has more than 4 vertices. With PLSS based geocoding sub-sections, sub-sub-sections and so on are found by interpolating along the sides of polygons to create cutting lines. With linear geocoding points are interpolated along a line. Interpolation plays a role in both forms of geocoding. This use-case illustrates a situation where geocoding produces polygons. Normally geocoding is thought of as a process to generate point locations. (If anyone knows of one please chime in!). I know of no standardized grammar for these legal descriptions, so the excel custodian and I worked together to make one up. These polygons are written to a shapefile along with attributes that were originally in the excel spreadsheet. It then uses the legal descriptions on those leases to find the appropriate Section polygon, then recursively divides and subdivides it as needed. The command uses the same dll to deserialize the xml file into a collection of lease objects. He then clicks a command and is prompted for an xml file and an output folder. The user first loads a PLSS polygon layer into the map (downloaded from BLM). The collection of leases is then serialized to an xml file. Oil leases can get nested pretty deep - down to 1/128th of a section as I recall. It might describe something like the N half of the SE quarter section of Section 21 Township whatever Range whatever. One of the attributes of the lease object is well formed legal description. The excel technician wrote the code that loops through rows in the spreadsheet, instantiating lease objects. The workbook contains VBA which references a data transfer class. The first tool lives within Excel and is used to export legal descriptions of leases from the spreadsheet into an xml file. I've developed tools for petroleum landmen that allow them to create polygons of leases based on PLSS legal descriptions in a spreadsheet.
