Idaho Transportation Department structured 15,000 boring logs in two days

A project that was previously impossible, delivered in two days

"Structify turned records we couldn't use into data we can actually work with. Once the boring logs were structured, they stopped being static files buried in scattered PDFs and became a real dataset we can query across projects, places, and time. Now we can click into a site on a map, pull its full boring history by location and date, and start asking bigger questions about ground conditions: what the soil looks like in a given area, how moisture has changed over time. That kind of visibility just wasn't possible before, and its value is immeasurable for us." - Garrett Speeter, Geologist and Project Manager, Idaho Transportation Department

The Idaho Transportation Department is the agency responsible for many of the highways and bridges that hold Idaho together, along with a network of select airways. It operates and maintains over 12,400 centerline miles of highway, 1,850 bridges, 2,523 miles of scenic byway, and 32 state backcountry airstrips, with a workforce of roughly 1,645 people across six transportation districts.

Generations of vital fieldwork also means decades of paperwork. Thousands of boring logs sat locked in disparate PDF formats, handwritten and digital, generated by seven different software tools including gINT, BoreDM and Adobe Acrobat. The engineering value was real and the data was unreachable.

Structify was brought in to solve it in partnership with ITD contractor BoreDM.

Results at a glance

What Structify built, and why it matters

Scattered PDF formats became one standard structure. Boring log data existed across handwritten and digital PDFs from seven different tools. Structify built a pipeline that reads each format and extracts the relevant fields into a single standard structure.

Trapped data became analysis-ready fields. Information locked in unstructured documents prevented any cross-project analysis. Structify extracted both header metadata and interval-level geological detail, so the output supports the questions rather than just storing the answer.

Unworkable at scale became automated at volume. Manual entry was never realistic at this size. The pipeline processed roughly 15,000 logs across 20,000 pages and avoided an estimated 3,750 hours of manual work.

No proven workflow became end-to-end delivery. BoreDM, working on behalf of ITD, identified a high-value opportunity in the historical boring data, but unlocking it required an extraction workflow that did not exist off the shelf. Structify scoped, diagnosed and executed it, working out how to make the extraction hold up in practice.

ITD can now analyze historical boring data across sites and time periods through a map-based interface, instead of relying on manual document review.