2025 WA GIS Conference

Over the past year, the King County GIS Center embarked on a sizeable effort to overhaul publishing, distribution, and data access for the county’s internal enterprise GIS data library. Instead of directly connecting to an on-prem enterprise geodatabase, users will now access hosted feature services through ArcGIS Online, allowing for faster access and better scalability. To facilitate the migration, the King County GIS Center developed a suite of tools including a robust ETL process, renewed Spatial Data Catalog, metadata cleanup effort, new ArcGIS Pro Add-In, and educational content on a Hub site. Join us as we dive into data discoverability, distribution, and tools to make it easier for our users to find the data they need.

Topics include:

• Overview – Transitioning users from a custom data access plug-in in ArcMap to using web services in ArcGIS Pro.

• ETL and more – Get a peek into our ETL process, and the added functionality around categorizing, tagging, and sharing of data.

• Metadata cleanup – How the Enterprise Data Modernization project daylighted metadata problems and how we addressed them.

• Spatial Data Catalog – A new application to search for King County data, allows for more robust searchability than built-in ArcGIS Online tools. Designed to be as accessible as possible.

• Add-In and educational content – Instead of creating custom tools for data access within -ArcGIS Pro, we provide education to our users on how to access the data they are familiar with.

Why is data so important for modern government and why is there a need for better data sharing? This presentation will focus on the state’s goals and newly released Enterprise Data Strategy to create a unified data ecosystem to help state agencies make better decisions. Joanne will walk through examples of how we can combine spatial and non-spatial data to improve efficiency and services. Partnerships, pathways and people help make that magic happen and Joanne will focus on what we as a GIS community can do to help accomplish these goals.

Prior to GIS technology Washington Department of Health (WADOH) operated with limited ability to access, search, or share authoritative geospatial data. This made collective and collaborative workflows difficult, as processes are siloed, primarily paper-based, and manual. Moving to a web-based, Enterprise GIS platform supported WADOH’s Data Modernization Initiative and empowered agency staff to create and share content more effectively.

Using configurable solutions available in our Enterprise GIS platform (such as Esri’s Experience Builder, Dashboards, and Survey123) and other existing technical solutions (such as Power Automate Flow) we can streamline common workflows and create systems that are connected, adaptable, and sustainable. During this session, Tonya will share WADOH’s modernization story and examples of how GIS is helping transform public health workflows.

Through a grant from the CDC Foundation, Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department has had the opportunity to begin work on developing an Informatics Strategic Plan. This presentation will cover the topic of informatics, data governance and the work involved in developing an informatics strategy and how GIS plays a role in the process.

ArcGIS Enterprise (and to a lesser extent ArcGIS Online) requires a healthy amount of user and content (data) management to keep the ecosystem healthy. And in a medium to large size organization, managing your Web GIS Users and their content can quickly become a full-time job. At the City of Tacoma, we’re using a combination of Dashboards, Experience Builder and FME to create a user and item management tool that allows us to track who owns what, how much of it they own, and even if they’ve done the requisite training for their user level. In this presentation I will demonstrate how we’ve incorporated the existing system status reports and a few other data sources to make a much more useful user and content management tool. I will also demonstrate how I’m hoping to automate more of the process in the future.

Washington State Hydrography Dataset (WASHD) program in the Department of Ecology is leading a project to remap the hydrography of Washington State to support the new 3D Hydrography Program led by USGS. This dataset will replace the old National Hydrography Dataset with a more accurate and modern alternative for hydrography analysis and cartography. This presentation will provide an update on the status of this remapping and regions that WASHD hopes to map in the next year. We will also review how we plan to manage changes in the hydrography data structure to meet the needs of Washington state hydrography Stakeholders. While mapping hydrography appeared to be a simple straightforward process, the project quickly became complicated. We will demonstrate our Project Management framework, tools and practices that have helped WASHD define objectives and goals, documenting important decisions and issues, and managed schedules. By leveraging project management, we enhanced communication both within our team and with our numerous stakeholders, leadership, and GIS subject matter experts. We will leave time to answer questions both about the hydrography mapping and project management.