On November 19, 2025, the City of Marietta held a GIS Day celebration featuring a comprehensive presentation by the Geographic Information Systems team. The meeting highlighted the evolution of the city's mapping capabilities from static maps to advanced digital twins, emphasizing that approximately 80% of government data possesses a spatial component. Presenters detailed various internal and public-facing applications, including specialized map viewers, dashboards for fire department analytics, drone programs, and community engagement tools, while outlining future plans for 3D modeling and data standardization.
All right. Hey, thank you guys for being here today. And we'll start off with a big happy GIS day. And today is a good day to celebrate. We'll explain why. These guys are going to do a great job walking you through what they do. But I want to say that GIS is widely supported here at Marietta from the city manager to the city council to the BLW. And they continue to invest in this technology because it does provide a lot of value to the organization. It helps people improve processes, change processes. And it's something fundamental that we're doing now. It's a regular thing for us. So we're always striving to be a smarter city. And I would say that GIS enables us to do that because it acts as the connective tissue of smart cities. It's not just maps. It's the framework that lets different systems talk to each other. So if you think about the evolution of GIS. So we started with static maps, and we've moved along, and these guys are going to walk you through a lot of what they've done. And they've got us from static maps to you know almost to the point where we can do things like digital twins. So they'll walk you through a lot of those technologies today. We have internal viewers, external viewers, they're going to walk through that. And then if you think about the people who maintain the spatial databases, so the people in this front row, they're going to talk about what they do every day and how they manage that data, help you guys manage that data so that it can be used. So have any has anybody ever heard this statement that all data has a spatial component? Like 98% of all data has a spatial component. That's a widely used term, especially in GIS circles. I don't really know if it's true. But I will tell you this, that 80% is probably more accurate. And so when you think about the data that we have in government, most of the data has a spatial element. So it's something we can put into some kind of portal, some kind of map, some kind of uh tool that you can use out in the field. So things like work orders, they have addresses, things like budget line items. You don't think about financials, but typically those are tied back to facilities or departments or districts. Um obviously traffic data, transportation data has a special spatial element, planning data has a spatial element. Umtilities, all the utilities, whether it's a water line, an electric line, an address of a customer, that's all a spatial element. Um personnel, people work in a location, they do a function, they're moving around different places to take care of it. So even personnel has a spatial function. Um here's some of the things that deserve celebration on in GIS. Um, spatial intelligence that powers everything that we just talked about. Um GIS can take very complex data and simplify it with a visual picture. Um then the way GIS provides access to that data, right? So a lot of times data has always been siloed. GIS is you know kind of founded on the idea of sharing that data and letting people see it, use it. Um so that's something that should be celebrated. Um you're gonna hear some amazing things from Jim, Alexis, Thomas, Brody, and Stephanie. Um they're gonna talk about what they do, and I hope you guys all walk away thinking about what you do every day, what data you use, and how you could use it better to improve your process and how you connect with the GIS team and let the you let them help you come up with a new solution. Um so I appreciate you being here, and with that, I'll turn it over to Jim. Thank you. Thank you, Ronnie. And thank you all for spending some time with us today to celebrate GIS Day. Um this is actually the 26th worldwide GIS Day. It was started in 1999 as a day that was meant to kind of have people in the GIS community share with others that are not a part of GIS and kind of show what we do and you know try to inspire people who don't think about GIS to think about GIS. Um the purpose of this presentation, yes, it is to show us some things that we've done recently, but it's also really meant to show you all and hopefully inspire you all to think about how you can use like Ronnie was saying, how to use GIS in your daily workflows and how we can try to help with through collaboration to create some new tools and new applications.