When you need one
When assets are spread across a territory instead of inside a building: street lighting, street furniture, trees, waste containers, water or power networks, or installations spread across a region.
There, a street address is not enough. A light pole has no building number, and a pipe run has no floor.
Where it comes from
Almost always from the customer’s geographic information system (GIS), such as QGIS or ArcGIS. The most practical open format for moving it is GeoJSON. Background layers such as aerial imagery or parcel maps are served with the WMS and WMTS standards.
What maintenance adds
The GIS knows where each item is. Maintenance knows what happens to it: its failures, its inspections and its work orders. A useful GIS inventory brings both together on the same asset.
The usual mistake
Importing with the wrong coordinate system. If the file is in a projected system such as UTM and gets read as longitude and latitude, the items land in the ocean. The other mistake is importing without a stable ID per item: every new import duplicates the inventory.