Building a feature class with new and historical features

Question

Hello,

I need to build a polygon feature class representing land use classes. This feature class needs to keeps all historical changes on yearly basis, where some polygons will change and others will remain the same. I wouldn't like to store separate layers for each year, instead, I would prefer to use the start/end dates of each feature to determine whether a feature belongs to a specific year. Since some old a new features will overlap, what are the functions/tools to create and maintain all history in one feature class and make sure to build/maintain valid topology for each year version?

Many thanks

Fabio

FabioGrita · Answer

Thank you Dana,

Yes, I was looking at the archiving tools of ArcGIS Pro and I realize they require an enterprise database. I am running on ArcGIS Pro for personal use and therefore I tried to connect my ArcGIS with a PostgreSQL database. I am not familiar with the Archive functions yet, but I saw I can store historical features with their period of lifetime. This is good, but I also need to use historical features to re-create past land use layers (e.g. the land use situation of the year 2005). This implies to maintain topology across the different historical versions of the land use.

Do you know if I can maintain topology across features of different years, or the Archive stores historical features just for tracking changes?

Many thanks

Fabio

DanaNolan · Answer

What software are you using? If you can use SDE (enterprise) databases, there is an archiving toolset for tracking histories of feature classes as well as editor tracking, which operates at the record level. So search for these; they may be available with other software such as Pro.