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.

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.

The City of Tacoma has been using distributed collaborations to share data between Enterprise portal and ArcGIS Online since 2022. Progress has not been linear: there have been many challenges. We will share how our distributed collaborations are set up, lessons learned along the way, and tips and tricks to help you on your own distributed collaboration journey.

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.