A working definition
Infrastructure Asset Continuity is an organization’s ability to locate, verify, retrieve, preserve, and transfer critical infrastructure information throughout the lifecycle of an asset.
It is not a claim that every record is perfect. It is the ability to make the organization’s best available knowledge useful to the next person who needs to plan, inspect, repair, locate, or operate that infrastructure.
The next person should not have to rediscover what the organization already learned
A map can show an approximate location. A PDF can contain a valuable detail. A veteran employee can remember an exception. Continuity exists when those pieces can be connected to the asset and retrieved when work happens.
That connection runs from asset location to field verification, documentation, institutional knowledge, field retrieval, and operational history. Each part makes the others more useful.
More than having information
GIS, digitized records, PDFs, as-builts, asset inventories, and project closeout documents can all contribute to continuity. None guarantees it by itself.
The useful question is not only, “Do we have a record?” It is, “Could a person who was not part of the original work find, trust, understand, and use that record at the point of work?”