BIA-GEO Assist

Overview

Development stage

PilotSource: b) Pilot – The use case has been deployed in a limited test or pilot capacity.

High-impact designation

Not high-impactSource: c) Not high-impact

Impact justification

Not reported

Start date

2026-01-30 (day precision)Source: 1/30/2026

Withheld from public reporting

NoSource: a) No

Mission

Topic area

Service Delivery

Operational functions

Summarization, FOIA and records management Derived by keyword rules; see methodology

Problem the AI is intended to solve

The Branch of Geospatial Support (BOGS) and Regional Geospatial Coordinators (RGCs) offer technical support to BIA and Tribal GIS users that participate in the DOI Enterprise Licensing Agreement (ELA). The BOGS ELA Helpdesk Coordinator and RGCs allocates several hours per week to address helpdesk submissions that are rudimentary in nature and/or concerning licensing offered and the process and requirements for participation in the ELA. RGCs allocate significant amounts of their time to the creation of Map layouts to provide data products to BIA, stakeholders and Tribes. We would like to expand the use of this tool to see if it can be customized to reference data sets maintained by DRIS to automate the creation of these maps in a predefined template to eliminate the workload of map creation from existing data. This tool also has the potential to assist with responding to FOIA requests, Our Division answers or collaborates on numerous FOIA requests each year. I would like to develop an internal version that could scour a FOIA repository to determine if this request is a duplication of a previous request and have it provide the dataset that was provided as a response.

Expected benefits

Reducing the number of basic questions concerning rudimentary processes and/or general licensing and eligibility question will reduce the number of hours spent on helpdesk tickets and allow the RGCs ELA helpdesk coordinator to focus more time on managing

System outputs

Answers to user questions are generated by summarizing the results obtained from web queries that reference the predetermined web references built into the custom HTML code that was used to create the tool. However, we would like to explore expanding the tools capabilities to query internal data sources to automate the production of GIS products based on pre-approved public data. We would also like to utilize this tool’s functionality to scour past FOIA requests and their associated responses to determine if a duplicate request has been received and provide the dataset or decision made for the previous FOIA request or a determination that the current request is unique in nature.

Technology

AI classification

Generative AISource: Generative AI: AI that generates new or synthetic content (e.g., images, videos, audio, text, code).

System name(s)

Not reported

Custom-developed code

No

Public source code

Not reported

Sourcing

How it was built

Developed in-houseSource: b) Developed in-house

Vendor (as reported)

Not reported

Vendors (standardized)

None on the standard list

A vendor is the supplier named by the agency. It does not identify the underlying model or AI technology.

Data and privacy

Involves PII

No

Privacy Impact Assessment

Not reported

Authorization to Operate

No

Demographic features

k) None of the above

Training and evaluation data

none

Federal Data Catalog

Not reported

Governance

0 of 8 minimum-practice questions answered. A blank answer means the agency reported nothing; it does not mean the practice is absent.

Potential impacts and how they were identified

Not reported