Tracking genealogy of geometry changes/historical snapshots in time

Question

Trying this board to see if my question gets any attention...

How are others tracking genealogy of geometries/layers where we must keep track of historical snapshots in time? As example for us, we need to know what the zoning or historical districts or habitat planning layers looked like on the day a permit was submitted for, not what the current most up to date version is.

Is there no way around copies of layers archived in a fgdb? Thoughts?

jcarlson · Answer

Of course! If the parcel fabric is overkill, you could just put "date created" and "date retired" fields on your features and manage them that way. Would still let you do some time slider action to interactively visualize how things looked.

BrittanyBurson · Answer

Josh, thank you so much for this comment. My team has been tossing around the idea of parcel fabric potentially meeting this need without knowing of any actual use cases, so this is super great to hear you're using it successfully in this way. We'll do some research in this area.

- Brittany at City of San Diego

jcarlson · Answer

A parcel fabric works great for this kind of thing. We have a whole parcel fabric just for zoning, permits, and other ordinance-related items that aren't necessarily tied to property ownership, but which we want historic information about.

It would take a little more work to pull the parcel fabric's record dates into the features, but is perfectly doable. The end product is a time-aware layer of districts, etc., that you can browse by date.