2025 WA GIS Conference

Covington Water District is committed to providing clean, safe and reliable drinking water to the communities in Southeast King County. As part of its ongoing efforts to enhance operational efficiency and service delivery, the District has embarked on a transformative journey by implementing the ESRI Utility Network. This advanced technology enables the District to manage its infrastructure with unique precision and insight.

The technology offers a unified model for visualizing and analyzing utility networks, allowing for detailed insights into the water distribution system. By integrating this technology, Covington Water District can improve network safety and reliability through built-in data governance, ensuring accurate asset locations and attributes. The implementation also facilitates real-time collaborative workflows, enhancing communication and efficiency across various business units.

This presentation will delve into the strategic implementation of the Utility Network at Covington Water District, highlighting the challenges faced, as well as the benefits of advanced GIS technology solutions. Attendees will gain insights into how these technologies are revolutionizing water utility operations, driving operational efficiency, and enhancing service delivery.

Using the collection of Utility Network Foundations is a productive and quick way to get your agency up and running with ESRI’s next generation of utility asset tracking and modeling. There is a healthy collection of ESRI documentation on the use of the Foundations, but sometimes, expert written documentation can assume prior knowledge that the audience may not possess. This can slow down adoption and create uncertainty in both the agency’s technical team but also their customers.

In this session, we will do a cursory examination of the data migration tools provided by the Foundation toolboxes. We will examine the available migration scripts: how to use a data mapping workbook, extending the basic schema, and execute a data load. We will look at the resources available to help you on your journey and share advice. At the end of the session, you will hopefully feel more confident in the preparation of your Asset Package for deployment in a single-user or enterprise environment.

This presentation explores the challenges encountered in integrating Esri's Utility Network Data Model (UNDM) with CGI’s PragmaLINE Outage Management System (OMS), a critical component for efficient utility operations. The integration process has relied on manual data model adjustments and JCMB's DataPort for Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) operations to facilitate data flow between systems. These tools have been essential in overcoming integration challenges, ensuring data consistency and compatibility between Esri’s UNDM and CGI’s OMS.
Throughout the project, several key data model challenges emerged, highlighting the complexity of the data and underscoring the critical collaboration between various business units essential for the success of the integration. This presentation will discuss the specific issues that arose, such as data inconsistencies and interoperability hurdles, and the approaches we took to resolve them. From leveraging manual data model adjustments to utilizing ETL processes, we will explore the solutions that were implemented to ensure data integrity and seamless integration. Additionally, the presentation will touch on the ongoing efforts to address emerging data anomalies and the collaborative work between various business units that was vital to overcoming these challenges.

Geospatial data are different than other data because they include something special: coordinates. This presentation will focus on those X, Y, Z and M coordinates that we care so much about. We’ll review coordinate systems and precision, and the key pieces of geospatial metadata we need to use coordinate data. How long is a degree, anyway? What are some data format considerations for coordinate precision? What’s the matter with Web Mercator? Since many GIS systems project data on the fly, why bother to project data into a cartesian coordinate system? Why does the choice of coordinate system for raster data and raster analysis so critical? Come for a review of these basic, yet very important topics.

The Puget Sound On-the-Water Shoreline  360-degree Photo Mapping Project is a groundbreaking initiative by EarthViews Conservation Society (EVC).

The goal was to create a publicly accessible, high-resolution visual record of Puget Sound’s marine shoreline. The project successfully documented 2,571.05 linear miles of shoreline across 14 counties, making it one of the most extensive water-level shoreline image surveys in Washington State history.

Using kayak- and vessel-based surveys equipped with 360-degree panoramic imaging systems and geospatial tracking, EVC collected 433,317 geotagged image scenes. These data are published through the EarthViews platform, an interactive online map that allows agencies, researchers, and the public to explore current shoreline conditions in a spatially organized and user-friendly format.

The project fulfills part of a state mandate passed in March of 2023 (Senate Bill 5104) to provide improved documentation of shoreline condition and offers a scalable, replicable model for science-based conservation. The resulting dataset provides a robust visual and spatial baseline that can support future restoration planning, regulatory review, climate resilience strategies, and long-term monitoring.
This effort reflects an unprecedented achievement in coastal documentation, offering a new standard for transparent, accessible shoreline data and delivering tools that will help protect the ecological and cultural integrity of Puget Sound for years to come.

This research project uses GIS to raise awareness and provide resources and support for people living with chronic conditions; specifically, endometriosis, adenomyosis, and chronic pain. Through Survey123, I captured anonymous data relating to the personal challenges faced by those with these conditions as they navigate the healthcare system, among other information. After geocoding a list of specialists sourced from support groups, I used Network Analyst to generate service areas for each specialist. This analysis helps to identify gaps in healthcare access. Finally, I created an Experience Builder to present the results of this analysis in an engaging, and easy to understand format. The Experience Builder contains sections dedicated to mapping access to specialists, anonymized locations of survey respondents, a section to highlight stories from people with these chronic conditions, and links to support groups among other information. Through this project I hope to increase awareness and bring hope to those with these chronic conditions.

This presentation highlights the work of University of Washington Professional and Continuing Education Students’ GIS Community Sponsored project with 4Culture.

4Culture, the cultural funding agency for King County, WA, sought to analyze, visualize, and present the impacts of 2 grant programs: Building for Equity and Doors Open Facilities. These programs distribute grants to organizations that are acquiring, building, or renovating facilities that make cultural experiences possible. By utilizing GIS, 4Culture and the UW GIS students hoped to highlight the impactful and effective use of a GIS in an arts and culture organization where GIS did not exist. Students created an ArcGIS dashboard for 4Culture’s internal uses as well as a StoryMap to be used for community engagement.

Maptime Seattle is a community group dedicated to making geospatial technology accessible and engaging through beginner-friendly workshops. Our meetups are free and centered around open-source tools so anyone can participate. Our events cover topics ranging from web mapping and Python to hand-drawn maps and social gatherings.

For geospatial professionals, Maptime can be an opportunity to give back, mentor newcomers, and expand the local mapping community by lowering the barrier to entry for geospatial education. Come learn more about who we are, what we do, and how you can get involved or make your own group!

A GIS Strategy to Map Historic Racial Covenants Across Washington State
Stacy Warren, Logan Camporeale, Larry Cebula, Tara Kelly, Monique Baxter, Rachael Lowe

The Washington State Racial Covenants Project, in response to Washington House Bill 1335, seeks to identify all properties with recorded covenants or deed restrictions that include racially discriminatory language. Ultimately, all property owners and prospective buyers should have an easily accessible tool to check whether a given property has ever had a racial covenant associated with it. A team of student and faculty researchers at Eastern Washington University has been tasked with tracking down, mapping, and sharing these documents with the public across fourteen counties in Eastern Washington. We report on the critical role GIS has played in achieving these goals. Specifically, we use a combination of ArcGIS Pro for geodatabase development and Experience Builder for presenting our results in interactive map form.
Our interdisciplinary team includes historians, geographers, anthropologists, geoscientists and GIS practitioners. Much work has to be accomplished before GIS ever enters the picture; this project would not be possible without the hours our historians spent in dusty archives and our partners at University of Washington scanning and converting images to text. Properties with racial covenants can then be identified and entered into spreadsheets. We next developed a workflow to geolocate information from the spreadsheets into feature class layers, align with existing GIS layers from a variety of sources, and populate with attributes pulled from associated historic documents. This data forms the basis of our Experience Builder map series, starting with a prototype model for Spokane County that we are now applying to other counties in Eastern Washington. We report on our workflow design and logistics, problems encountered, and solutions discovered.