Environmental Assessment Platform
A formal pollution-scoring instrument turned into an API: georeferenced water, air and land contamination cases scored against a defined criteria set.
Problem
An environmental body assessed pollution incidents on paper using a structured scoring instrument with different criteria per contamination type. The instrument was well designed and entirely offline, so nothing could be aggregated, triaged or compared across cases.
Approach
Transcribed the instrument faithfully rather than redesigning it. The assessment is polymorphic by pollution type with three mutually exclusive criteria blocks, twenty scored criteria in total, each carrying its original name inline so the mapping between the client form and the API is never lost. Four-state case workflow where a rejected case is a reviewed case rather than a deleted one.
Outcome
The client scoring instrument works as a system: cases are filed with evidence photographs and location, then triaged through an explicit review workflow.
How it's built
Polymorphic assessment document with three embedded value-object criteria blocks, discriminated by pollution type. The criteria counts are asymmetric because the three instruments were designed independently by the domain owner.
Transcribe the client instrument rather than normalise it
Gaseous waste is scored under water pollution because it affects water. That is a domain distinction, not a modelling mistake, and flattening the three blocks into a uniform criteria set would destroy the meaning the instrument carries.
Three asymmetric blocks are harder to aggregate across than one uniform set, the cost of keeping the domain intact.
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