The spatial data your agency already owns, answerable by anyone who can type a
sentence with the answer drawn on the map.
vectorgis.ai
The problem
Every agency has more spatial data than it can use. It sits in an enterprise
geodatabase behind a licence, a login, and a skill set that can prevent the people who need
answers from getting them.
What VectorGIS does
Simply type a question the way you'd ask a colleague in plain language. Using your GIS Metadata, VectorGIS determines which of
your layers can answer it, builds a query, answers in plain language, and
highlights the result on the map so you can see what it counted.
The question panel and the map, side by side.
Tip the questions in this brochure are samples. They run against SANDAG's
free public data because that is a dataset anyone can open and check the answers
against, not because VectorGIS is tied to it. Your deployment runs on your data,
the layers your staff already work in every day. Your questions, your assets,
your answers.
This is more than a demo trick:
VectorGIS runs on your data and knows when to say no. The app will tell you
when the data can't support an answer instead of producing a plausible number.
Note the following are real demo questions, asked on a real dataset, with
the real answer and the real response time. Nothing here was mocked up.
21
questions
4
topic areas
4.3s
fastest answer
12s
typical answer
$0.056
typical cost to answer
The dataset behind these examples
These examples were run against a regional San Diego dataset of 63 published layers
covering parcels, transportation, utilities, hazards, housing and demographics. All GIS data services used in this app are accessed through San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) free, public data portal: https://geo.sandag.org/server/rest/services/Hosted.
That portal was chosen because it is public, so every answer in this brochure can
be checked by anyone. It is not a limit on what VectorGIS can read. Your
deployment is built against your own published services, on the data your agency
maintains and uses every day.
The questions
Every question below is tagged with the kind of work it comes from, so you can
skim to the ones that look like yours rather than read to find them.
Field ops
Maintenance and field operationsThe questions a crew lead or a work-order desk asks, an address, a parcel, a
pipe under a street. No layer names, no attribute tables, no GIS analyst required.
Public works
Public works and engineeringNetwork-scale questions about the assets the agency owns and maintains, answered
against the live data rather than a spreadsheet exported last quarter.
Planning
Planning and community developmentOverlay and containment questions, the kind that normally mean a request ticket
to the GIS team and a two-day wait.
AskedPlanning
“What affordable housing developments are there in Escondido?”
VectorGIS answered
Three existing developments, 137 units between them.
Not a count but a roster, each development with its address, unit mix, who it
serves and its AMI cap: The Breezewood (33 units, families), Valley Senior
Village (50, seniors 62+) and Veterans Village of San Diego (54, veterans). It
also says plainly that this is the regional inventory's record of Escondido and
may not be every affordable unit in the city.
Three developments, 137 units, with the detail behind each.
The three developments, highlighted in Escondido.
Answered in 16.3s
$0.062 to answer
AskedPublic works
“How many property-damage-only collisions have there been?”
VectorGIS answered
211,642 property-damage-only collisions.
This dataset codes the same category two ways. Property Damage Only appears on
191,012 records and PDO on another 20,630. Matching only the spelled-out value
returns a number that looks entirely reasonable and quietly drops 20,630 real
collisions. It counts both.
Two spellings, one category; counted once, correctly.
Every property-damage-only collision in the region, highlighted.
Answered in 8.4s
$0.048 to answer
AskedField ops
“What's the APN for 1319 Tamarack Ave in Carlsbad?”
VectorGIS answered
APN 2062623200
Carlsbad is a jurisdiction with no descriptive coverage in the dataset at all;
there is no document to retrieve and no text to match. The address channel
resolves it directly off the parcel record.
One address in, one parcel out; 4.3 seconds.
The single parcel, selected and zoomed to.
Answered in 4.3s
AskedPlanning
“Where are the Tier 1 housing solution areas and what do they allow?”
VectorGIS answered
291 parcels, about 551.78 acres, with no limit on floor area ratio.
Two questions in one sentence: where they are, and what the designation
actually permits; both answered from the same record. The allowance is stored as a
literal string in the data and has to be matched exactly, not paraphrased.
291 Tier 1 parcels, and what the designation permits.
All 291 Tier 1 parcels, highlighted.
Answered in 16.2s
$0.053 to answer
AskedPublic works
“How many miles of sewer main does the city have?”
VectorGIS answered
About 3,231 miles of sewer main.
A whole-network total computed from the geometry at the moment you ask, not read
off a spreadsheet someone exported last quarter. The kind of number that
normally means a request to the GIS team.
No map; this one is a single number, and it says so rather than inventing a selection.
Answered in 10.8s
$0.053 to answer
AskedPlanning
“How many affordable housing units are there in total?”
VectorGIS answered
7,052 units across 94 developments.
The answer also says out loud that this is a regional figure covering all of San
Diego County, not any single city, because the most likely way to misuse this
number is to quote it as one jurisdiction's total.
All 94 developments in the regional inventory, highlighted.
Answered in 11.4s
$0.062 to answer
AskedPublic works
“How many miles of bike boulevards are there in the region?”
VectorGIS answered
11.49 miles of bike boulevards.
The dataset spells this class Bike Boulevard. Ask for "bike boulevards" and a
system that matches on the phrase you typed returns nothing at all. It matches
the stored value, not the question.
Every bike boulevard segment in the region, highlighted.
Answered in 9.4s
$0.054 to answer
AskedField ops
“What's the assessed value of 4880 Beaumont Dr in La Mesa?”
VectorGIS answered
$751,160 — land $512,020 plus improvements $239,140.
A street address in, a full assessment breakdown out. No APN to look up first,
no parcel layer to know the name of, and the land and improvement components
come back split rather than as a single opaque total.
Land and improvements, split out; 4.8 seconds.
The single parcel, selected and zoomed to.
Answered in 4.8s
$0.015 to answer
AskedPlanning
“How many affordable housing sites are in a transit priority area?”
VectorGIS answered
26 of the 94 sites — about 28%.
A spatial join the user never has to name: housing points against transit
priority polygons, with the denominator carried along so the number means
something. Nothing in the question mentions a layer, a join, or a buffer.
The 26 sites inside transit priority areas, highlighted.
Answered in 17.0s
$0.057 to answer
AskedPublic works
“Break down the bikeway network by type.”
VectorGIS answered
Bike Lane 1,224 miles (10,601 segments), Bike Route 395 (4,987), Multi-Use Path 203 (1,032), Separated Bikeway 64 (613), Bike Boulevard 11 (247).
17,480 segments in all, about 1,898 miles.
Five classes, with the segment count behind every line, returned as a table in
one pass. This is the shape of a capital-planning question: not "how much of X
do we have" but "how is X distributed". It is also the shape that usually means
exporting the layer and building a pivot table.
All five bikeway classes, highlighted together across the region.
Answered in 14.7s
$0.056 to answer
AskedPlanning
“What's the range of median household income across census tracts?”
VectorGIS answered
$24,125 to $250,000 — a spread of $225,875 across 729 tracts.
729 of the region's 736 tracts have income data and seven do not. Averaging the
missing ones in as zeros would drag the floor down and nobody would notice. The
answer states the denominator it used.
The census tracts with income data, highlighted.
Answered in 14.8s
$0.053 to answer
AskedField ops
“Look up APN 2062623200.”
VectorGIS answered
1305 Tamarack Ave, Carlsbad — 0.162 acres, assessed at $719,452.
Two address points are linked to the parcel: 1305 and 1319 Tamarack Ave.
The reverse of the question above: a parcel number in, the address and
assessment out. The same parcel carries two address points (1305 and 1319
Tamarack), and the answer surfaces both rather than silently picking one.
A parcel number in, an address and a valuation out.
The parcel, selected and zoomed to, with both address points inside it.
Answered in 14.5s
$0.019 to answer
AskedPublic works
“How many transit routes does NCTD run?”
VectorGIS answered
NCTD operates 40 transit routes.
The table has 125 rows for those 40 routes, because a route is stored as several
shape geometries. Counting rows gives 125 and looks perfectly plausible. It
counts distinct routes.
All NCTD routes, highlighted across North County.
Answered in 8.6s
$0.057 to answer
AskedPlanning
“How many acres of estuarine and marine wetlands are there?”
VectorGIS answered
About 6,590 acres of estuarine and marine wetland.
The wetlands layer mixes land wetlands with open water. The category that sounds
closest to what was asked, Estuarine and Marine Deepwater, is 2.4 million
acres of open ocean and bay, roughly 365 times larger. Summing the layer and
calling it "wetlands" produces a number that is enormously wrong and looks
authoritative. The answer breaks the categories apart and says which one is the
habitat figure.
The estuarine and marine wetland polygons, highlighted along the coast.
Answered in 16.0s
$0.055 to answer
AskedPublic works
“How many pedestrian fatalities have there been?”
VectorGIS answered
1,390 pedestrian fatalities recorded in the SWITRS collision data.
Two defensible readings of this question exist in the data: count the collisions
flagged as involving a pedestrian fatality, or add up the pedestrian fatalities
recorded across all collisions. The second is the one that answers what was
actually asked, because a single collision can involve more than one fatality.
Every collision with a pedestrian fatality, highlighted.
Answered in 7.8s
$0.057 to answer
AskedPlanning
“Which watersheds does Poway fall within?”
VectorGIS answered
Four — Poway Creek, San Vicente Creek, San Dieguito River, and Lower Santa Ysabel Creek.
A city boundary against a watershed layer, with the answer being a list rather
than a number. The kind of overlay question that normally means a request ticket
and a two-day wait.
Poway's four watersheds, highlighted.
Answered in 10.6s
$0.058 to answer
AskedField ops
“How large is the property at 8872 Artesian Rd, San Diego?”
VectorGIS answered
18.81 acres on the assessor's record — 18.876 computed from the geometry.
Two numbers exist for this parcel and they do not match. Rather than pick one
and present it as the answer, it reports the assessor's recorded acreage as the
figure of record and the computed geometry area beside it. Which one is correct
depends on what you need it for, and that is the user's call to make, not the
software's.
Two acreages that disagree; both shown, each with its source.
The parcel, selected and zoomed to.
Answered in 5.6s
$0.011 to answer
AskedPublic works
“How many parcels in Chula Vista are in the AE flood zone?”
VectorGIS answered
1,017 parcels in Chula Vista fall within the AE flood zone.
A containment question across two unrelated layers, assessor parcels and FEMA
flood zones, with no precomputed join between them. It also volunteers that
parcel boundaries come from a tax-assessment fabric rather than a legal survey,
which is the caveat that matters if anyone acts on this number.
All 1,017 affected parcels, highlighted inside the flood zone.
Answered in 22.9s
$0.057 to answer
1,017 parcels highlighted
AskedPlanning
“Do you know where the schools are?”
VectorGIS answered
Yes — 997 schools, across the region.
There is no layer called "schools." The schools live inside a general places
layer as one type among many, so answering this means knowing what is in the
data rather than matching the word in the question to a layer name. "No" would
sound honest here and would be wrong.
997 schools, found in a layer that isn't called 'schools'.
All 997 school points, highlighted across the region.
Answered in 20.7s
$0.064 to answer
When the answer is 'no'
The most important thing a system like this can do is refuse to make something
up. These are the questions we use to prove it.
AskedTrust
“How many cities are in San Diego County?”
VectorGIS answered
18 incorporated cities.
The straight version of the question, asked without a false premise attached.
It is here so the correction in the next question has something to stand on:
the same number, arrived at the same way, whether or not the question tries to
push it somewhere else.
The 18 city boundaries, highlighted.
Answered in 8.2s
$0.060 to answer
AskedTrust
“There are 45 cities in San Diego County, right? Just confirm for me.”
VectorGIS answered
No — there are 18 incorporated cities.
The question contains a false premise stated with confidence, which is exactly
the prompt most systems will agree with. It corrects the number instead, and it
does not quietly fall back to a text lookup to do it.
The 18 city boundaries, highlighted.
Answered in 14.8s
How it fits what you already run
VectorGIS sits on top of your existing services. It does not replace your GIS,
your webmaps, or your editing workflows; it gives the rest of the organization
a way in.
Reads your published feature services as they are.
Builds a search index on our server from those services; no changes to
your GIS.
No change to how your GIS team publishes or maintains anything.
Pilots run on public or non-sensitive layers only.
Find out more
To learn more, or to schedule a demo or consultation, contact us at:
info@vectorgis.ai
Sources
Map layers come from the free, publicly available ArcGIS services that SanGIS and its member agencies host on the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) Data Warehouse for public use at:
https://geo.sandag.org/server/rest/services/Hosted
VectorGIS is an independent application, not affiliated with or endorsed by SANDAG or by SanGIS and its member agencies. The answers and analysis shown here are generated by VectorGIS and not provided or reviewed by SANDAG or by SanGIS.