idea Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner. in ArcGIS Parcel Fabric Ideas

Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

SamMontoia1 — Wed, 14 May 2025 22:24:40 GMT

Having a method or methods of helping the system identify parts of a description that it missed would be helpful. Namely in my document shown, the system missed the bearing and distance that is described from a section corner. Ordinarily I would put this information in the Connection Lines; and in this case the bearing needs to be inverted to assign the starting point at the section corner.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

HeatherWidlund — Thu, 15 May 2025 12:58:51 GMT

I'm really excited about this tool, but we need more control. Please implement this idea.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner. - Status changed to: Needs Clarification

AmirBar-Maor — Fri, 16 May 2025 06:26:13 GMT

@SamMontoia1

The first release of COGO Reader does not support PLSS. Thank you for attaching the deed - it let's us see that it failed to read cardinal directions ('running north', 'running south').

We consider COGO reader missing reading the directions as a BUG and recommend opening a technical support case for those.
Is your idea about pointing out to where COGO Reader has failed? Like selecting the text, right clicking and choosing 'Add as direction' or 'add as distance'?

Or is the idea about teaching COGO Reader that 'running south' means 180 degrees (north azimuth format)?

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

SamMontoia1 — Fri, 16 May 2025 11:50:52 GMT

@AmirBar-Maor Fundamentally yes, my idea is about pointing out when the cogoreader misses a bearing and or distance. So in this case it was unclear to me how I might get the reader to detect that the bearing from the section corner is apart of the connection line. My experience was that the reader did not detect this bearing and distance.

And yes I added s90°e for the bearings that were south. And for North I did the similar thing. After adding this to the text, the reader used these bearings to get the rectangular polygon.

Including the document is definitely an aspect that I initially failed to do. So for others reading this and posting here: adding the document is a good practice. It definitely helps that you seemingly had a similar experience as I did with this legal description with the Cogoreader

It is really exciting that it worked so well. And interesting that the PLSS reference is well a tough problem. I am in Colorado and so the most common legal description pattern is just like this one. The bearing from the section corner is inverted in the traverse tool to get to the starting point.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

AmirBar-Maor — Fri, 16 May 2025 12:16:46 GMT

@SamMontoia1

Thanks for the quick response.
When developing and testing COGO Reader we tested with deeds from many states, but not all them, and surely not with enough deeds from Colorado.

I've created a bug for missing out on those directions. The words 'bears' and 'running' are throwing it off.

If you remove those words it will pick it up correctly, including the connection line:

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

SamMontoia1 — Fri, 16 May 2025 15:05:57 GMT

That worked for me too. Removing the Word "Bears" empowered the CogoReader to pick up the bearing and dimension and put it into the Connection Line. In this instance, the keyword "whence" usually gives me the clue that the Bearing in the description is a 'Backwards' looking direction, Thus SouthEast becomes NorthWest; and I always imagine it as if I were standing at the starting point and looking back at the PLSS Section Corner; and that's how it is written; but the traverse tool needs to have the forward direction from the starting point of the section corner; and then moving around the traverse. This inverted pattern of getting from the section corner to the point of beginning is very common.

Ideas of how to add to the training/testing data to the CogoReader's understanding may belong in a different place on this community. I guess I wish I knew how I could contribute; or if and how the system is building its understanding.

Noting that discussion of incorporating the PLSS may belong in a different or separate idea or spot on this community; Our area of Colorado references the New Mexico Principal Meridian; Other areas of Colorado, seemingly reference the 6th Prinicipal Meridian.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

SamMontoia1 — Thu, 22 May 2025 13:47:48 GMT

I have found that adding "from the point of beginning" and reversing the bearing direction N W becomes S E in this case, helps the Cogoreader identify the Connection Line information.

In this one for me, the last Curved segment Delta Angle of 02°54'42" and radius of 1329.76 to the left; it calculates it having a distance about 4' longer than what is stated in the text which is 67.57'. The measurement it came up with was 71.41 or something.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

ScottSweet2 — Fri, 23 May 2025 02:20:53 GMT

I'm new to parcel fabric so maybe I'm missing something here, but this feature doesn't work at all for me, even after extensive editing of the misread pdf. Can anyone else out there make this one work? I've got hundreds of these documents in the same format and it would save boatloads of time getting this feature to work instead of typing in metes and bounds descriptions for the next 20 years. See link to pdf here: drainage easement pdf

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

AmirBar-Maor — Fri, 23 May 2025 11:27:25 GMT

@SamMontoia1

To your question:

"Ideas of how to add to the training/testing data to the CogoReader's understanding may belong in a different place on this community. I guess I wish I knew how I could contribute; ..."

You are already contributing. THANK YOU!
We could not test all the permutations in all the states, so this is very helpful and helps us improve COGO Reader. The best way is to submit a technical support case with the deed attached and the information you provided in this thread.

In future releases, we are thinking of letting you add your keywords

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

AmirBar-Maor — Fri, 23 May 2025 13:05:23 GMT

@ScottSweet2 - the link to the pdf file you provided is not reachable. Can you please add it as an attachment instead?

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

ScottSweet2 — Fri, 23 May 2025 17:00:15 GMT

I can attach as many of these documents as you want to help train your model, but I don't see any icon to attach pdf files. I can convert them to images if that works for you. I'll do one of them here.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

AmirBar-Maor — Tue, 27 May 2025 12:55:20 GMT

@ScottSweet2 Mahalo for sharing a deed from Hawaii.

There are a few things that prevent COGO Reader from succeeding:

Scan quality - the document is poorly scanned and there are many text extraction issues (OCR).
Use of north azimuth - is this common in Hawaii? AFAIK all other states use quadrant bearings.
The word 'Thence' is not used

Once those 3 issues were addressed, and assuming I haven't made a mistake, the misclose was 0.5'

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

SamMontoia1 — Tue, 27 May 2025 21:49:42 GMT

Greetings,

The reader seems to miss common arc description patterns:

This is the way it kind of read it down, (I made some text corrections to help it read better):

This is what I corrected it to:

and it closes within 0.01 feet.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

ScottSweet2 — Thu, 29 May 2025 18:59:37 GMT

@AmirBar-Maor , Yes almost all our metes and bounds descriptions are written this way in Hawaii County. Reference is x,y distance from a trig point and then directions are described from "true south". Do you recommend scanning in higher resolution than 300dpi? How can I improve scan quality? These are original documents from the 1970's and earlier, typed on very thin archive paper.

So you had to convert all the coordinate formats to quadrants and insert the word "thence" for each line, or was there an easy way to convert these coordinates and text automatically, like with an Arcade expression? If I have to convert coordinates and write "thence" on each line, it may not save me that much time. Will you include this type of description in a later release? I know we are a small subset of your overall customers, but this would be really helpful for us.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

ScottSweet2 — Thu, 29 May 2025 22:44:21 GMT

@AmirBar-Maor , It also looks like the curved portion of the description was not picked up? The image you attached did not pick up the curve. The third description should have been a 20 foot radius curve to the right. The scan quality doesn't look much different than the other examples in this thread.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

JamesMoy — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 21:04:23 GMT

@AmirBar-Maor Georgia, US here. I am also having issues getting the reader to recognize curves - the only bearing listed for curves in the surveys I am processing comes from the Chord Bearing, which the reader consistently treats as a separate dimension from the Arc info. I can't reorder or rewrite the text in any way that makes a difference. I know theoretically the chord measurements are optional as long as the previous bearing, arc direction, length, and radius are included, but when the reader uses the previous bearing it comes out wrong.

TLDR it might need to be trained on survey language from GA - specifically regarding curves.

I would love to provide a screenshot but don't have permission for some reason, sorry I am new here

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

AmirBar-Maor — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 12:08:22 GMT

@JamesMoy - welcome to the community.

The best would be to contact esri technical support and provide the failing deeds with the chord bearing.

We are already fixing a few issues that have to do with curve extraction and that will help us make sure we covered Georgia.
COGO Reader is for the US only

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner.

AmirBar-Maor — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 13:54:39 GMT

@SamMontoia1 @JamesMoy @ScottSweet2 @HeatherWidlund

This "idea" became a technical support bug case 🙂

If the OCR works well but COGO Reader fails, please contact technical support and supply:

The deed
Where it failed
Any tips, if you have any, on how you made it to work

The goal is, of course, for COGO Reader to succeed without spending time modifying the extracted text. After all, the whole point is to save time.

Ideas are for software enhancements: improvement of the current capabilities or new capabilities.

Our goal is to support all the common permutations of deeds, in all US states. We do not discriminate easements or administrative boundaries. They are all 'parcels' for us.

Re: Guiding the CogoReader -- Helping it identify when the reader misses bearing and distance from a section corner. - Status changed to: In Product Plan

AmirBar-Maor — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 13:58:45 GMT

Courses with partial dimensions will be displayed in the grid without COGO values.

This will be an indication that COGO extraction failed.