Five times faster: how I automated geospatial data entry using GIS.

During my time at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) in the summer of 2022, it was exciting to see how the organization was moving towards developing an ecosystem of geospatial data to be shared and referenced organization-wide. From planning future projects, to figuring out the details of a particular engineering project, simply accessing hundreds of relevant layers in one place proves invaluable for an organization like this. With GIS data portal technology, transportation planners and engineers can deliver projects in a way that is more sensitive to complex geographic conditions, and avoid future complications because informed decisions can be made earlier on.

Example of a GIS layer in the CDOT Region 4 Planning Tool—project delivery teams can now quickly access and visually see important geographic information and assets.

However, inputting geospatial data for the first time can be a headache. I was tasked to input over 1000 historical sites into the Historical Sites Inventory at CDOT. The initial workflow required me to draw polygons representing each entry, and then manually enter several attributes, including measurements of acres, perimeter, area, and centroid coordinates of the shapefile. With this manual data-entry technique, I could upload about 6-10 sites per hour. Even if there were only 1000 historical sites to enter, that would take someone about 125 hours of valuable time! Realistically, with thousands of historical sites to be entered organization-wide, this time investment is through the roof.

However, GIS data doesn’t have to be uploaded manually! Using the GIS ‘ModelBuilder’ tool, complex processes can be automated, saved, and replicated throughout an organization. While often used for spatial analytic processes, ModelBuilder can be used for data input and processing as well!

Watch the video below for an overview of how I used Model Builder to automate a geospatial data entry process.

My tool takes an excel sheet input with information from PDF sheets. It then generates points from a XY coordinate table. Wherever points intersect with parcels, those parcels are selected and the associated attributes from the points are applied to the parcels. Then, necessary fields are calculated, added, and deleted until they are cleaned up and resemble the data structure that the source destination requires. Finally, the newly input shapefiles can simply be copy and pasted to the webhosted site inventory.