A method of aligning source infrastructure data to be compatible with a conceptual schema that provides a unified digital description of real-world infrastructure, comprising: detecting source data of an infrastructure description in one or more external databases or source files has changed since a last alignment; in response to the detecting, reading at least the changed source data by a source-format-specific bridge software process executing on one or more electronic devices; applying by the bridge software process, one or more schema mappings, that relate a source data format to the conceptual schema, to the changed source data, and transforming spatial data from a source coordinate system into a spatial coordinate system used by the conceptual schema or transforming unit labels from a source unit system into a unit system used by the conceptual schema, to produce a description compliant with the conceptual schema; computing, by an update agent executing on the one or more electronic devices, a changeset for the produced description by executing a sequence of database modification commands on a private copy of a database with change-detection functionality turned on, recording effects of database modification commands on the private copy to accumulate a record of effects, and saving the record in the form of a changeset; storing, by infrastructure modeling hub services executing on the one or more electronic devices, the changeset; applying, by a client, the changeset to a particular instance of the database maintained according to an underlying database schema of the conceptual schema to update an infrastructure description therein, by modifying tables of the particular instance of the database or the structure of the particular instance of the database; and using, by the client, database entries from the particular instance of the database to display a visualization of the updated infrastructure description to a user. detecting source data of an infrastructure description in one or more external databases or source files has changed since a last alignment; in response to the detecting, reading at least the changed source data by a source-format-specific bridge software process executing on one or more electronic devices; applying by the bridge software process, one or more schema mappings, that relate a source data format to the conceptual schema, to the changed source data, and transforming spatial data from a source coordinate system into a spatial coordinate system used by the conceptual schema or transforming unit labels from a source unit system into a unit system used by the conceptual schema, to produce a description compliant with the conceptual schema; computing, by an update agent executing on the one or more electronic devices, a changeset for the produced description by executing a sequence of database modification commands on a private copy of a database with change-detection functionality turned on, recording effects of database modification commands on the private copy to accumulate a record of effects, and saving the record in the form of a changeset; storing, by infrastructure modeling hub services executing on the one or more electronic devices, the changeset; applying, by a client, the changeset to a particular instance of the database maintained according to an underlying database schema of the conceptual schema to update an infrastructure description therein, by modifying tables of the particular instance of the database or the structure of the particular instance of the database; and using, by the client, database entries from the particular instance of the database to display a visualization of the updated infrastructure description to a user.