Survey plans are drawings made for people, not databases. There's no standard schema and no industry format that carries their meaning. Two firms can draw the same project so differently that the plans share almost nothing visually while carrying identical information.
A busy sheet means tracing each feature, matching it to the legend, reading the callouts, scaling the distance, and checking it against the checklist — for everything on the page. It's careful work, and it doesn't get faster with volume.
A question costs a minute. A third party nobody contacted costs a shutdown, a re-survey, or a relationship. Completeness is the thing that matters, which is why the system is built for it rather than for speed.
Your admin makes a couple of decisions and reviews a draft. Everything between those points runs without attention.
Your client's name is removed from the plan before anything is transmitted, so no document Thirds holds identifies whose project it is. You label the analysis with the job number you already use.
It works from the plan's own legend, so it can handle a survey from a firm it has never seen. It finds the third-party features the project interacts with, measures every distance that matters, and applies the AER and CER rules. Where it can't resolve something confidently, it asks you rather than assuming.
The list arrives grouped by party and feature, with consents separated from notifications and a statement of completeness against the checklist. Any line opens to show where on the plan it came from and the rule that produced it — so you're checking a documented result, not deciding whether to trust an unexplained one.
Approval is the gate. Until an admin approves it the draft is a proposal, and nothing issues on the system's own authority — the finished list is a decision your team made, not one the software made for you.
An ambiguous label, an unfamiliar symbol, a feature drawn a way it hasn't seen. When that happens the system stops on that item and escalates it — with the relevant part of the plan already in front of your admin — rather than proceeding on an assumption.
Asks
Most escalations are small: a yes or no about something specific, a choice between two candidates it couldn't separate, a value to confirm. Where a feature's path is genuinely unclear, your admin gets the drawing and marks it directly.
Waits
The item waits for an answer rather than proceeding on an assumption. A consent list is only as good as its completeness, and a missed party carries consequences a question never does. The design priority is completeness over automation — handing back what it can't resolve rather than maximising what it resolves alone.
Learns
Every correction and every answered question is kept as an example. A convention corrected once for a survey firm doesn't need correcting again on the next plan from that firm. The questions get fewer over time — they don't stop.
The requirement types Thirds determines from the plan:
Plans don't generally state which regulator governs a line, so Thirds treats a pipeline as AER-regulated by default. Your admin can switch any individual pipeline to CER, and the affected measurements are recalculated — nothing is left behind under the previous setting.
| CER-regulated | AER-regulated | |
|---|---|---|
| Proximity | Consent required, whether 5 m or 30 m | Consent 0–5 m; notification only 5–30 m |
| Equipment crossings | All crossings require consent, including light vehicles | Vehicles ¾ tonne or under cleared without consent |
| Ground disturbance | Consent within the prescribed area, 30 m each side of centreline | Consent 0–5 m; notification 5–30 m, with 10 days required to lapse |
| Everything in Canada | All processing and storage takes place in Canada. Project data is never sent to any external or public AI service — the models are self-hosted and run privately on dedicated GPUs we operate in Canada. |
|---|---|
| The client's name is never received | It's removed before the plan is uploaded, and the upload is refused if anything remains. Redaction removes the client's name; it does not remove the location or the third-party operators, because those are the substance of the drawing. A breach could not connect a plan to one of your clients. |
| Nothing is kept | The plan and everything derived from it are deleted when the analysis ends — the upload, the rendered sheets, the extracted geometry, the legend, the escalations, and the lists. Thirds is not a document repository. You can trigger deletion at any time. |
| Assigned access only | No public registration and no self-signup. Authentication runs through an established identity provider, MFA is supported and can be required, and authorization is checked on the server for every request. Removing a user takes effect immediately. |
| Encrypted, logged, segregated | Encrypted in transit and at rest, including backups, with keys in a dedicated secrets store. Your firm's data is segregated from any other firm's. Authentication, uploads, approvals, corrections, and deletions are written to an append-only log that references documents by internal identifier rather than by name. |
Grouped by party and feature, consents separated from notifications, and ordered to a preference stored per client — because your clients don't all want the finished list arranged the same way. Ordering changes the sequence and never the contents.
We'll walk you through Thirds end to end and answer the specifics for the projects your firm actually runs.
