The geospatial work closest to this record’s own estate. A mapping tool with a measurement widget, built to answer one question: which municipal fiber runs near a given address, across the 220-location plant.
The layer list and the node color key were agreed up front, which is the easy part.
The engineering was straightforward and the data was not. The transportation authority layer had to be created and digitized from the Skyway alignment. The state transportation layer came from elsewhere again. Each had its own currency, its own accuracy and its own owner, and none of them had been assembled for this purpose.
A geospatial application is only as good as the authority of the layers underneath it, and the layers belong to other agencies. That is the whole difficulty of cross-agency mapping stated plainly: the drawing is trivial, the provenance is not, and nobody can delegate the provenance question to the person building the tool.
Outcome
A question that used to need a records search answered from a browser — once three agencies' layers could be trusted in the same view.