Local and state government agencies carry some of the heaviest data responsibilities in the geospatial field. They maintain the authoritative records of who owns what, where infrastructure sits, how much water is available, and what a neighborhood could become. This session brings together practitioners who are doing that work now and asks what is actually delivering results. Speakers will show how artificial intelligence, automation, remote sensing, and mobile data collection are being folded into established government workflows, and where those tools stop and human judgment takes over.
Each presentation stays grounded in operational reality, including the constraints of legacy records, staffing limits, and the accuracy standards that public data has to meet. Attendees will leave with transferable approaches for improving data quality, reducing manual effort, and building the trusted foundation that everything downstream depends on.
This session will include the following presentations:
AI-Assisted Cadastral Digitization at Harris Central Appraisal District
Presented by Rebecca Lasica, Magnasoft, and Joshua Dye, Harris Central Appraisal District (HCAD)
Every authoritative parcel begins as a legal document: the recorded subdivision plat. Harris Central Appraisal District (HCAD), the third-largest appraisal district in the United States, manages 1.5 million real property parcels and roughly 150,000 parcel changes a year, and is one of the most advanced ArcGIS Parcel Fabric operations in the country. Yet a bottleneck persists that GIS maturity alone cannot resolve. Thousands of historical and active plats exist only as scanned images, and because HCAD maps each parcel before its appraisal record can be built, converting those scans sits at the very front of the pipeline. A specialist must traverse boundaries and re-key every bearing, distance, and curve, which can take one to several days per subdivision.
Working with Magnasoft and the Esri ArcGIS Parcel Fabric team, HCAD evaluated an AI-assisted workflow that reads survey annotations directly from raster plats, reconstructs traverses through coordinate geometry (COGO), and applies a least-squares cadastral adjustment so that the recorded legal dimensions, not the pixels, remain the source of truth. Because an authoritative record of ownership cannot be handed to a black box, every subdivision passes through specialist review before it is committed. On real HCAD plats, the workflow produced geometry within the district’s 0.02 ft tolerance standard and appended cleanly into the production Parcel Fabric, reducing per-subdivision effort from days to minutes.
The session also shares HCAD’s own perspective on what these results mean in practice, including where automation reaches its limits. Scan quality, legacy-record inconsistencies, and plats that omit dimensions or curve data still require a person, and HCAD will not let a model infer what the surveyor should have recorded. Presenting the legal value rather than a plausible one is what makes the record authoritative, and it is why agencies far beyond HCAD can rely on that data every day.
Connecting Physical Assets to Digital Records
Presented by Mike Klonsinski, Berntsen International, Inc
GPS gets you to the right location. RFID tells you exactly what you’ve found. For organizations managing buried utilities, critical infrastructure, public assets, and equipment, knowing you’re standing in the right place doesn’t always mean you’ve identified the correct asset. As infrastructure ages and records become disconnected from the field, verification becomes just as important as location.
This presentation explores how organizations are extending Esri ArcGIS Field Maps and Survey123 with passive RFID technology to create a permanent digital connection between physical assets and GIS. By combining GIS, RFID, and mobile workflows, field crews can instantly identify, verify, inspect, and update assets with confidence—reducing errors, improving efficiency, and strengthening asset data throughout the infrastructure lifecycle. Through real-world case studies, attendees will see how RFID-enabled GIS workflows are delivering measurable results across multiple industries, including Municipal Waste and Recycling, Election Asset Management, Utilities and Public Works, and Environemental and Natural Resources.
Attendees will also learn how organizations are building a scalable digital infrastructure strategy by connecting physical assets directly to GIS, improving field data quality, and creating a trusted foundation for enterprise asset management, digital twins, and future AI-driven decision-making.
Bringing AI-Powered Digital Twins to Underserved Municipalities
Presented by Andrés Vásquez, Aeroestudios
Digital Twins and Artificial Intelligence are often associated with large metropolitan areas and multi-million-dollar investments. But what if these technologies could also transform small and underserved municipalities? This session presents a real-world approach developed through geospatial projects across Colombia, demonstrating how existing aerial imagery, GIS data, and AI can be integrated into cost-effective Digital Twins that improve municipal planning, infrastructure management, environmental monitoring, disaster risk reduction, and public decision-making.
Drawing from projects in Antioquia, Colombia, attendees will learn how municipalities with limited budgets and technical resources can leverage modern geospatial technologies without starting from scratch. The presentation will showcase practical workflows that combine photogrammetry, Lidar, GIS, Digital Twins, and Artificial Intelligence to generate actionable insights for local governments.
Rather than focusing on technology alone, this presentation highlights how innovation can reduce the digital divide and enable smarter governance for communities that traditionally have had limited access to advanced geospatial solutions.
