Report Builder

A completed job produces files, e.g.: a GeoTIFF, a shapefile, a link to a map. Sometimes, what the person who commissioned it needs is a document, something to attach to a claim, file with a regulator, hand to a committee or send to a client. Today that conversion happens by hand in a word processor, and it is where a good deal of the value of the analysis quietly disappears into somebody’s afternoon.

From a finished job the builder assembles that document: the result mapped at a sensible scale with a legend and a scale bar, the summary statistics that matter for that particular service, before-and-after imagery where the analysis is a comparison, and the methodological record: which data, which dates, which parameters, which version of the service. That last part is what makes a document defensible rather than merely presentable, and it is the part a person writing under time pressure leaves out.

Each service carries a default template that knows what matters for it: a flood report leads with extent and affected assets, a deforestation report leads with the plot verdict and the date of loss. An organisation can hold its own templates on top: its cover, its typography, its mandatory sections, so that what arrives is already in the form its recipients recognise and its reviewers expect.