VectorGIS

Welcome to VectorGIS

VectorGIS turns your organization's spatial data into something anyone can use — no GIS training required. Instead of learning query languages, map layers, or attribute tables, you simply ask a question in plain language and VectorGIS finds the answer, explains it, and shows it on the map.

What makes VectorGIS different:

• It's conversational. You ask questions the way you'd say them out loud — and you can keep going. Follow-up questions build on what you just asked, like talking with someone who already knows your data.
• It shows its work. Every answer comes with the sources it used and an optional step-by-step breakdown, so you can trust what you see.
• It turns answers into action. Found something in the data that needs attention in the field? Turn it into a task in a couple of clicks, with the location and details already attached.
• It understands your tasks, too. Every search also looks through your tasks automatically — so each answer shows not just what's there, but the work already tied to it.
• It learns. When an answer isn't quite what you wanted, a quick comment steers it — right away in your session, and (once your administrator approves it) for everyone afterward.
• It isn't locked to one AI. VectorGIS is model-agnostic: your administrator can choose which AI models power it and upgrade them over time, without changing how you work.

You don't need to understand any of the technology behind this to use it. If you can type a question, you can use VectorGIS.

Behind the scenes, VectorGIS pairs a natural-language understanding engine with your live GIS database. When you ask "Who owns the property at 123 Main St?" or "Show me the water lines installed before 1980," the system interprets your intent, looks up the right data, and returns a clear answer alongside an interactive map.

This guide is in two parts:

• Part 1 — Using VectorGIS covers everything an everyday user can do: signing in, asking questions, working with the map, organizing answers into projects, creating field tasks, and giving feedback that improves the system.
• Part 2 — Administration covers the Admin console: task templates, the query cache, diagnostic reports, and model configuration.

Part 1 — Using VectorGIS

Signing in

VectorGIS signs you in with your organization's existing ArcGIS Online account. There is no separate VectorGIS username or password to create or remember — if you can sign in to your organization's ArcGIS Online (or ArcGIS Enterprise) portal, you can sign in to VectorGIS.

When you open VectorGIS, you're sent to your organization's familiar ArcGIS Online login. Sign in there, and you're returned to VectorGIS ready to work. Because access rides on your ArcGIS Online account:

• Your administrator controls who gets in. Access is granted and revoked through your organization's ArcGIS Online accounts, by your administrator — not inside VectorGIS.
• You only see what you're entitled to see. VectorGIS works with the data your account already has access to.
• There are no extra credentials to manage. Nothing new to reset, rotate, or forget.

The main screen at a glance

When you sign in, VectorGIS opens to a split view: the question panel on one side and the interactive map on the other. Everything you do starts from one of these two areas.

The key elements are:

Asking a question

This is the heart of VectorGIS. Click into the "Ask a question about GIS data…" box, type a question the way you'd say it out loud, and press Search (or hit Enter).

You can ask about:

• Specific features — "Who owns the property at 123 Main St?"
• Counts and filters — "How many fire hydrants are within the downtown district?"
• Attributes and history — "Show me the water lines installed before 1980."
• Measurements — "How large is the parcel at 200 Main Street, and how many permits does it have?"
• Spatial relationships — "Which parcels are adjacent to the new park?"

VectorGIS automatically decides whether your question needs a direct database lookup, a spatial calculation, or a descriptive answer drawn from your reference documents — you never have to specify which.

What VectorGIS can and can't answer

VectorGIS only knows what's in your organization's own GIS database — the layers, attributes, and reference documents that have been loaded for your account. The one exception is location lookup: to resolve an address or place name you mention, it can call Esri's World Geocoding Service to turn that text into coordinates. Beyond that, it does not search the web, "Google" anything, or reach into any other database, spreadsheet, or set of files. If a fact isn't in your GIS data, VectorGIS won't have it — so an empty or low-confidence answer usually means the information simply isn't in the data you've connected, not that the question was asked wrong.

It's also worth knowing that VectorGIS answers questions — it doesn't act on them. It is not an agentic assistant: you can't tell it to edit a record, change data, send an email, or carry out a task on your behalf. It reads your data and reports back; any changes to the underlying data are still made through your normal GIS tools.

Reading an answer card

Every answer comes back as a card in the results area. A card contains the answer itself plus a set of controls along the bottom edge.

• Answer text — the plain-language response, often including a count, a measurement, or a short explanation.
• Match-quality badge — a small indicator of how confident VectorGIS is in the match. Hover over it to see the quality level.
• Sources — the underlying data layers or documents the answer was drawn from, so you can verify where the information came from.
• Map update — when an answer involves mappable features, VectorGIS highlights them automatically on the map.
• Tag — adds this question and answer to your active project. The control is labeled Tag, not "save" (see Projects).
• Create Task — appears on answer cards that return mappable features, and turns the answer into a field task with that data attached (see Creating and managing tasks).

When a question returns multiple matching features, use the Previous feature (‹) and Next feature (›) arrows on the card to step through them one at a time; the map highlight follows along.

Related tasks come up with every answer

You're never only searching your map data. Every search also looks through your tasks automatically, so each answer card includes a task panel with two tabs:

• Related Tasks — tasks directly linked to the features in your answer (the work already attached to those exact parcels, hydrants, lines, and so on).
• Task Search — tasks whose descriptions closely match what you asked, found by meaning — even if they aren't linked to these features yet.

Each listed task shows its status, priority, and assignee, with a View button to open it. So a single question tells you both what's there and what work is already happening around it — you don't run a separate task search to find out.

Analysis Mode

Flip the Enable Analysis Mode toggle before searching when you want VectorGIS to break down an answer rather than just state it. Analysis Mode is ideal for questions where the "why" or the "how much" matters.

With Analysis Mode on, answer cards gain an Analysis tab alongside the standard answer. The Analysis view shows the reasoning, intermediate numbers, and any calculations VectorGIS performed — useful for reports, audits, or double-checking a surprising result.

Working with the map

The map is fully interactive and stays in sync with your answers.

• Automatic highlighting — features referenced by an answer are highlighted as soon as the answer appears.
• Click a feature — click any highlighted feature to see its details.
• Pan and zoom — navigate the map the same way you would any web map.

Selecting several features at once

When you want to select several features at once — for example, every parcel in a block — use the selection tools in the small strip on the left edge of the map, just below the zoom buttons.

The second strip, directly below these three, is the measurement tools (distance, area, and clear) — a separate set that has nothing to do with selection.

1. Click the tool you want — it highlights to show it's armed.
2. Drag the box, or draw the lasso.
3. The matching features are selected and highlighted, and a selection card appears in the results panel.

The tool disarms itself after one selection, so the map goes straight back to normal panning and zooming — click it again for the next selection. Clicking an armed tool a second time also disarms it without selecting anything.

Two things are worth knowing about what gets caught:

• Anything your shape touches is selected, not only what falls entirely inside it. A box that clips the corner of a parcel selects that parcel.
• Only the layers you can actually see are searched. A layer switched off in the Layers panel — or switched off because the group it sits in is — is skipped, and so is a layer you're zoomed too far out to draw. If a selection comes back empty when you expected features, that's the first thing to check.

To select just one feature, click it on the map; that replaces whatever was selected before.

Projects: organizing your work

A project groups related answers under one name, so a day's worth of research or a single investigation stays together instead of scrolling away. But a project is more than a folder — it's how VectorGIS remembers a conversation.

To start a project:

1. Click Start project ▾ at the top of the question panel.
2. Choose an existing project or type a new project name (up to 60 characters).
3. Once a project is active, a banner shows its name, and new answers are associated with it automatically.

To add an individual question and answer to the active project, click the Tag control on that answer card. (There is no "save" button — tagging is how you save.) To switch projects, open the Start project menu again; to clear the active project, use the Clear active project control on the banner.

Why this matters — projects are conversational. VectorGIS works best as a back-and-forth: you ask, it answers, you refine. When you Tag a question, its answer, and especially any comments you left into a project, you aren't just filing it away — you're saving the context of that exchange. The next time you open that project, VectorGIS can pick the conversation back up: your earlier questions, answers, and comments come back into play, so a follow-up question lands with everything you'd already established still in mind. That's what lets you stop today and resume an investigation days later without starting over.

Creating and managing tasks

VectorGIS can turn a finding into a field task — a unit of work you can assign, schedule, and track. This bridges the gap between discovering something in the data and acting on it.

You can review existing tasks and their status at any time from the Task Management panel (the task button).

Creating a task

A task always starts from data. The Create Task button only appears on an answer card or a selection card — that is, after you've asked a question that returns one or more features, or after you've selected features on the map. There is no standalone "create a blank task" button, and that's by design: when you click Create Task, VectorGIS attaches the features from your question or selection to the task, so the person doing the work inherits the exact location and data you were looking at.

So the flow is always:

1. Ask a question that returns features (e.g., "Show the hydrants overdue for inspection") — or select features on the map with the rectangle or lasso tool.
2. Click Create Task on the resulting answer card or selection card.
3. Fill in the task form.

The task form includes:

• Project name — a short label for the work (max 60 characters).
• Assignee — who will do the work (e.g., John Smith).
• Contact email — where updates should go (e.g., john.smith@city.gov).
• Description — describe the work that needs to be done.
• Estimated effort — a rough duration (e.g., 2 hours, half day).

Preview and Analyze

Before you commit a task, use Analyze to have VectorGIS examine the work description and surface the relevant data, location, or features. This produces a Task Summary so the person doing the work has the spatial context they need. Use Continue to move from analysis to a finished task, or Submit to save it directly.

You can later edit a task's details or delete it from the Task Management panel.

Task templates

If your team creates the same kind of task over and over — "inspect hydrant," "verify parcel boundary," "follow up on permit" — an administrator can publish a task template for it. A template is a pre-built task form: it can carry default values and require specific fields, so every task of that type captures the same information in the same way (for example, always recording a meter reading, a condition rating, or an inspector's name). Templates are how your organization keeps field work consistent and makes sure nothing important is left blank — and they can be built for any of your data. Your administrator creates and manages them in the Admin console; see Task Templates in Part 2.

Giving feedback

VectorGIS learns from your feedback, so it gets better at returning the answer you're looking for. Every answer card has feedback controls.

• — confirm the answer was what you were looking for.
• — let VectorGIS know the answer missed the mark.
• Add a comment — leave a note describing what you were actually looking for.

Your feedback is recorded and reviewed by administrators in the Diagnostic Reports console (Part 2). Leaving a comment is the single most valuable thing you can do to improve results for your whole organization.

How your comments come back to help you

Comments aren't just filed away for an administrator to read later — VectorGIS feeds them back into the engine to improve the very next answer.

• Right away, in your session. If an answer wasn't what you wanted, leave a comment, then ask the same or a similar question again. VectorGIS takes your comment into account on that next try, within the same working session.
• Later, if you saved it. When you Tag a question and its comment into a project, that guidance comes back the next time you work in that project — so the lesson isn't lost when your session ends.
• For everyone, once approved. Your administrator can approve a comment so it applies organization-wide, helping every user who later asks something similar.

VectorGIS decides which past comments are relevant by semantic similarity — it matches the meaning of your new question against earlier questions, not just the exact words. So a comment you left on "who owns 123 Main St" can still help when someone later asks "find the property owner at 123 Main Street."

Sessions and signing out

VectorGIS keeps you signed in for a working session. If you've been idle for a long time, you may see a Session Expired notice — just sign in again to continue. Your saved projects and tasks are not affected by a session timeout.

Part 2 — Administration

The Admin console is where designated administrators tune VectorGIS for the organization. Open it at the /admin URL. It is organized into four tabs.

Task Templates

The Task Templates tab lets you publish reusable task definitions so that common field work can be created in a couple of clicks instead of typed from scratch each time.

The tab lists All Templates currently published. For each template you can:

• Edit — open the template builder to change its fields.
• Delete — remove a template that is no longer needed.

Building a template

Click to create a New Template (or Edit an existing one) to open the builder. The builder is essentially a custom form designer: you decide exactly what information must be captured for a task of this type, and the worker is then prompted for it every time.

Start with the template's basics:

• Template name — what users will see when they pick this template.
• Layers — the data layer(s) the task applies to, chosen from your published layers.
• Default field values — pre-filled assignee, effort, or description text so users start from a sensible default.

Adding custom fields. Below the basics you build the form itself, adding as many fields as you need. Give each field a label and choose its type:

Add a field, choose its type, and — for a drop-down — type in the list of allowed choices. Repeat for every piece of information the task should capture. This is how you guarantee consistent, complete data: if a field is part of the template, it's collected every time, the same way, by everyone.

Save the template to publish it; it becomes immediately available to users in the task creation flow.

Query Cache

The Query Cache tab is a log of recent queries and the answers VectorGIS produced. It serves two purposes: performance (repeated questions can be answered from cache) and quality review (you can see exactly what users asked and what they got back).

For each cached entry you can:

• Inspect the Generated SQL — expand an entry to see the exact database query VectorGIS built from the natural-language question. This is the clearest window into how an answer was produced.
• Approve it — tick the Approved checkbox to let that entry serve future cache hits. Only approved entries short-circuit the engine; unapproved questions always fall through to a full, fresh interpretation.

Note — what's actually cached: VectorGIS caches the query logic (the SQL), not the wording of the answer. When a repeated question is served from cache, VectorGIS re-runs that saved SQL against your live database and builds a fresh answer from the current data — it does not replay an old, possibly stale answer. So if the underlying data changed since the question was last asked, a cached question still returns up-to-date numbers.

Note — approval also promotes the comment: Approving an entry does more than speed it up. If a user left a comment on that question, approving it also promotes the comment: from then on, when someone asks a semantically similar question, VectorGIS feeds your approved comment to the engine as guidance — so a correction one user made improves results for everyone who asks something similar later.

Reviewing the cache is the fastest way to spot a question that's being interpreted incorrectly — if the generated SQL is querying the wrong layer or filter, you've found the root cause of a bad answer.

Diagnostic Reports

The Diagnostic Reports tab aggregates user feedback and system health into a reviewable report.

The tab has two parts:

• Summary — an overview of recent activity and answer quality.
• Flagged entries — admin review — the answers users marked with or commented on, collected in one place for you to triage. From here you can Approve or Reject each one. Approving works exactly like approving in the Query Cache: the entry can serve future cache hits, and any comment on it becomes guidance for semantically similar questions across the organization.

Work through the flagged entries to find patterns: a layer with stale data, a phrasing the classifier misreads, or a missing reference document. Each flagged entry ties back to the question that produced it, so you can reproduce and confirm the issue.

Model Configuration

The Model Configuration tab controls which AI models power VectorGIS and how they behave. There are two independent stages, each separately configurable.

• Query Classifier — the model that reads each incoming question and decides how to route it (database lookup, spatial calculation, or document-based answer). The classifier determines whether a question is understood correctly in the first place.
• Answer Generation — the model that composes the final, plain-language answer once the data has been retrieved.
• Embedding model (set at deployment — not editable) — VectorGIS also relies on an embedding model: the component that converts text into numerical "fingerprints" so it can judge when two questions mean the same thing. This is what powers semantic search — matching a new question to similar past questions, comments, and reference material by meaning rather than exact wording. Unlike the two models above, the embedding model is chosen once, when VectorGIS is first deployed for your organization, and cannot be changed afterward (every stored fingerprint would have to be regenerated to match a different model). It's shown here for reference so you know which one is in use; it is not editable.

A Common Model Names reference is provided on the tab so you can enter valid model identifiers without guessing.

After changing any value, click Save Changes to apply the new configuration.

Appendix — Tips for getting the best results

• Ask one thing at a time. Compound questions ("how many permits and how large") usually work, but if a complex question gives a confusing answer, split it into two.
• Name your projects clearly. "Main St drainage review" is easier to find later than "project 3."
• Flag, don't just frown. A with a comment turns a bad answer into a fix.
• Use Analysis Mode for anything you'll report on. The breakdown is your audit trail.
• Verify with sources. When an answer matters, check the source layer listed on the card.

Appendix — Glossary