For years, AssetLab has helped organizations manage the assets that live inside their buildings - HVAC units, generators, elevators, fire panels. But for municipalities and campus operators, the most valuable assets don't sit in a mechanical room. They run under the streets and along the rights-of-way: watermains, sanitary and storm sewers, roads, streetlights, fibre, gas lines.
The new Infrastructure module brings those linear and spatial assets into AssetLab as first-class citizens - on a map, in your work orders, in your preventive maintenance program, and in your capital plan. It is available on the Enterprise plan, enabled per organization by an administrator.
- 50,000+ features per map, smooth at city scale
- 3 formats: GeoJSON, Shapefile, CSV with WKT
- 0-100 condition score on every feature
Why Infrastructure Data Ends Up Split
Nobody designs a data silo on purpose. Departments bought software at different times to solve different problems, so the geometry of a sewer network lives in GIS, its work orders in a CMMS, its condition scores in a consultant's spreadsheet, and its renewal budget in a capital plan or finance system. The only common language between them turns out to be a spreadsheet.
Every planning cycle then runs the same loop: export from each system, reconcile in Excel, take the plan to council, re-key approved projects into another tool, and update asset records months after the work is done. Along the way the systems disagree on asset IDs and on condition itself - a “3” on a 1-5 scale, a “Fair” in GIS, a “Yellow” in Parks - and someone has to translate by hand.
- Stale plans: condition changes reach the capital plan a cycle late, so the asset management plan is out of date before it is adopted.
- Update gaps: projects finish but the asset records never catch up, so a replaced main still shows as poor.
- Weak audit trail: when an auditor asks how a rating was set, the answer runs through a chain of spreadsheet versions.
What bringing it together enables: one record per feature, scored on one 0-100 condition scale, where inspections, work orders, costs, and replacement plans all attach to the same asset. A completed inspection updates the condition the capital forecast reads from, and your GIS stays the geometric source of truth rather than another copy to keep in sync. The rest of this post covers how that works.
What It Is
Infrastructure organizes your buried and linear assets into networks - a sanitary collection system, a road network, a water distribution system. Each network contains features of two kinds:
- Segments - linear assets such as pipe runs, road sections, and cable spans, with length, material, install date, slope, and inverts.
- Nodes - point assets such as manholes, valves, hydrants, catch basins, and poles.
Segments know which nodes they connect to, so your data carries real topology: a sewer main knows its upstream and downstream manholes, and the system can tell you when a segment's endpoints don't line up with anything - a data-quality signal most GIS exports quietly hide.
Every feature carries a condition score (0-100) with a full inspection history, and every network summarizes its replacement value, condition distribution and backlog. A network's average condition counts scored features only and says how many it rests on, so a network with one inspected pipe in two thousand cannot pass for a healthy one.
One story, not two: Infrastructure tied to your sites also feeds the existing Facility Condition Index, so your buildings and your buried assets tell one story.
The Map Is the Front Door
Open the Infrastructure page and you get a fast, modern map built on vector tiles - smooth at city scale, whether you have 500 features or 50,000. Color the map by condition, filter by network, material, asset class, or feature type, and click any segment or node to slide open its full detail: attributes, inspection history with a condition trend chart, linked work orders, photos, and documents.
Prefer rows and columns? Switch to the table view, or use split view where the map and table stay in sync - click a row, the map highlights the feature; click the map, the table scrolls to the row. Every table header sorts.
The built-in basemaps are vector maps - Dark, Streets, and a 3D buildings view with massing extruded to real height - with no account, key, or cost. You can also bring your own. Many municipalities have licensed aerial imagery or provincial WMS layers behind authentication; AssetLab supports custom XYZ, WMS, and WMTS sources, including authenticated ones, and token-secured ArcGIS basemaps where AssetLab mints and refreshes the tokens itself. Credentials are stored encrypted server-side and tiles are fetched through a secure proxy, so your imagery keys never reach the browser.
Getting Your Data In: The Import Wizard
The fastest path from "we have a GIS export" to "our city is on the map" is the import wizard. It accepts the three formats that cover nearly every real-world delivery: GeoJSON (the modern default), Shapefile (upload the .zip straight from ArcGIS or QGIS), and CSV with WKT geometry (the spreadsheet escape hatch, common for consultant deliverables).
Drag the file in and the wizard walks you through the rest:
1. Coordinate System
We read the CRS from the .prj when present and report what we found. When it isn't - or the coordinates plainly aren't degrees - the wizard stops and asks rather than guessing: a searchable EPSG picker (biased toward Canadian and US municipal codes - NAD83 UTM and MTM zones, State Plane) or a paste-WKT fallback gets you there.
2. Field Mapping
Your file's actual columns appear as drop-downs, pre-filled with best guesses - even the 10-character DBF names ArcGIS exports - across the full attribute set: name, material, install date, condition score, diameter, width, depth, lanes, slope, inverts, and status. Any extra column can be imported as a custom field, and anything left unmapped is still kept on the record.
3. Topology
Real deliveries ship the pipe layer and the manhole layer as separate files with no link between them. The wizard snaps segment endpoints to nearby nodes within a tolerance you control - tight for survey-grade data, looser for legacy 1990s shapefiles - and can auto-create stub nodes at orphan endpoints. Loosely snapped features are flagged so you know which connections are interpretive rather than authoritative.
4. Preview Before Commit
Nothing touches your live data until you've reviewed a full dry-run report: how many features will be inserted, what will be rejected and why, and what will import with warnings - for example, a gravity sewer whose inverts run uphill. You confirm explicitly; only then does the import commit, and the new features appear on the map immediately.
Behind the scenes the importer does the unglamorous work GIS data demands: it repairs self-intersecting geometry where it safely can, explodes multi-part features, harvests elevations from 3D geometry into invert fields, and even captures station/chainage values from M-aware geometries so nothing in your source file is silently thrown away.
Update mode: a pavement condition vendor or CCTV contractor returns a spreadsheet of fresh scores for assets you already have. Choose a stable match key, and the wizard updates the matched features and writes a new inspection record for each - condition history and risk capture included, no re-import of geometry required.
ESRI Integration
Most cities already run ArcGIS, and we designed Infrastructure to work with it rather than demand a migration.
Live Overlay
Paste the URL of any ArcGIS Feature Server or Map Server - public or token-protected - and AssetLab syncs that layer onto your Infrastructure map in minutes as a read-only overlay, toggleable per source, per user. Tokens are encrypted at rest and never exposed to the browser or written to logs.
Bind on Click
See a feature in the Esri overlay that needs a work order? Click it and choose Bind to Infrastructure Asset. From that moment you can attach work orders, inspections, costs, and documents to it, while your GIS remains the geometric source of truth.
One opinionated detail worth calling out: AssetLab binds on GlobalID only and refuses OBJECTID. OBJECTIDs get renumbered by geodatabase maintenance operations, which silently corrupts any external system that keyed on them. We learned this lesson so you don't have to - if your layer doesn't have GlobalIDs yet, it's one click in ArcGIS Pro to add them.
Operate It Like Everything Else in AssetLab
Once features exist, they plug into the workflows your team already uses:
- Work orders - create one directly from a feature on the map; it opens pre-filled. Completed work flows into per-feature cost history.
- Preventive maintenance - schedule PMs against an individual feature or an entire network ("flush every hydrant in Zone 3 annually"), with automatic work-order generation and catch-up handling.
- Inspections - record visual, CCTV, PCI survey, core sample, or gauge readings with photos, and watch the condition trend chart update.
- Compliance - scope recurring compliance items to a network, not just a building.
- Capital planning - replacement plans work per-feature and per-network, so a whole watermain renewal campaign sits in your planner next to your roof replacements; condition-driven forecasts paint the map by projected replacement year.
- Documents, photos, comments, custom fields, parts - everything you can attach to a building asset, you can attach to a sewer segment.
Automation: REST API and MCP
The full module is exposed through AssetLab's external REST API and MCP server. Tenant-scoped API keys with granular read/write scopes let your scripts list networks, create features, log inspections, and file work orders.
And because the MCP server connects to Claude and ChatGPT, you can simply ask: "Which sanitary segments scored below 40 in the last year, and do any have open work orders?" - and get an answer grounded in your live data.
Built Multi-Tenant From Day One
Infrastructure inherits AssetLab's security model wholesale. Every feature, inspection, import job, and Esri source is isolated to your organization by row-level security enforced in the database - not just in the application. Imports run through a private, tenant-scoped storage bucket. Esri tokens and basemap credentials are encrypted at rest. And tenant identity always derives from your verified session, never from anything a client sends.
Getting Started
Infrastructure is available today on the Enterprise plan. An administrator turns it on in Settings, and the typical first hour looks like this: create a network, drag in last year's GIS export, confirm the preview, and watch your city appear on the map. If your data lives in ArcGIS, paste your Feature Server or Map Server URL and you'll see it sync even sooner.
Frequently Asked Questions
What GIS formats can I import into AssetLab Infrastructure?
The import wizard accepts GeoJSON, zipped Shapefiles (the .shp, .dbf, and .prj are read together), and CSV files with WKT geometry. The coordinate system is auto-detected from the .prj when present, with a searchable EPSG picker biased toward Canadian and US municipal codes as a fallback.
Does AssetLab integrate with ArcGIS?
Yes. Paste the URL of any ArcGIS Feature Server or Map Server - public or token-protected - and AssetLab syncs that layer onto your Infrastructure map in minutes as a read-only overlay. You can click any Esri feature and bind it to an AssetLab infrastructure asset via its GlobalID, then attach work orders, inspections, costs, and documents while your GIS remains the geometric source of truth.
How does AssetLab measure network condition?
Every infrastructure feature in AssetLab carries a 0-100 condition score with full inspection history. Each network summarizes its replacement value, condition distribution and backlog, and its average condition counts scored features only, with how many features the figure rests on shown beside it. Level of Service can set network targets for average condition and keeps a monthly reading for a year-on-year trend.
Can I create work orders and PM schedules for roads, watermains, and sewers?
Yes. Infrastructure features plug into the same workflows as building assets: create work orders directly from the map, schedule preventive maintenance against a feature or an entire network, record CCTV and PCI inspections with photos, scope compliance items to networks, and build per-network capital replacement plans.
What plan includes the Infrastructure module?
Infrastructure is available on the AssetLab Enterprise plan and is enabled per organization by an administrator in Settings. Visit the pricing page for current plan details.
Ready to Put Your City on the Map?
Your streets, pipes, and poles have been managing themselves long enough.
Put them on the map.
Explore the Infrastructure module, or book a demo and bring last year's GIS export - we'll put it on the map together.
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