While the most well-known use for address points today is for emergency responders, there are many other important uses for address points. In this Spatial IQ for MapGeo webinar, we explore some local government use cases of address points and how this dataset can be incorporated into your wider GIS systems for incredible results.

Highlights and Soundbites:

Carson Vallino: “What’s really interesting about address points is that the local government is the authority on addressing; not the state, not the federal government. It means that the local governments like the small counties, municipalities and towns are the people that are responsible for creating and maintaining address points. So, when a new building gets a new address point in the town it’s the local town’s responsibility to do that. What these points are, they’re really the backbone of many local, state, and nationwide government projects.”


Symbolizing Address Points

Rebecca Davis: “We have one of our clients that displays their address points symbolized based on the color. If they are a sewer customer and if they are connected to sewer; if sewer is available to their property; or and if they’re not connected or if it’s not available at all. You can see those three different colors on this map: you have the blue, where sewer is available but they’re not yet connected; the green parts are sewers that are connected and they have a lateral going to the house, and the red doesn’t have sewer available at this time.”

We have another customer that utilizes their address points to link documents such as their Sewer Lateral cards to those address points. So, in their MapGeo site as soon as you click on a property that has a Sewer Lateral card, it will have a link to the card itself, and it will pop up as a PDF in a separate tab on MapGeo. So, while the sewer crews are out in the field they’re able to pull up these cards if there’s ever an issue. If there’s a question if there’s an emergency of some kind, all of the users on MapGeo can pull this up, particularly any Sewer Crew, any EMS, or fire crew.”


Tackling the problem of creating one master geodatabase

Rebecca: “We [AppGeo and our clients] have address points. We need to maintain them. What is the best way for your community to keep those address points updated, keep them authoritative, and make sure that everybody has access to that one same Master geodatabase? You don’t want to have to be maintaining four different geodatabases: one from the assessor, one from the planner, one for Public Works, one for Public Safety.”

“On the left, it’s showing a street number assignment card that is distributed within different town departments. So, you have the Town Administrator, Public Works, engineering, all the police and fire chiefs, the assessor and the building inspector along with the clerk; but you also include other departments such as the USPS postmaster. This example comes from Massachusetts so this one is sent also to the MassGIS, as well as the homeowner of that property. It has basic information in there, it has the date that the request was submitted, [and] what the request was for.”