What a WebGIS internship taught me about messy data
Written byZaki Hattaon
Three months of cleaning plantation maps at PT Mitra Tech Indonesia, and why the data work matters as much as the web work.
I joined PT Mitra Tech Indonesia as a WebGIS intern expecting to write code. I spent most of my time on data, and it turned out to be the most useful part of the job.
Every source tells a different story
Plantation data arrived as SHP files, CAD drawings and Excel sheets. Each followed its own conventions, and some used different coordinate systems for the same area. Before anything could appear on a web map, the data had to agree with itself.
What the work looked like
- Correcting broken or overlapping geometry in ArcGIS Pro.
- Standardising coordinate systems across every dataset.
- Digitising plantation blocks and infrastructure on screen where no clean file existed.
What I took away
A web map is only as trustworthy as the data under it. Working alongside GIS engineers and web developers showed me how much a clean dataset saves everyone further down the line, and it shaped how I handled the spatial data in Padang Rescue.
