Tiny slivers between polygons wont be detected by the Topology tool in ArcGIS 10.3.1

[MajorySilisyene]

Hi all,

I have been working on US and Canada shapefiles.;As you may know these are very huge files to edit, so I had to copy files on the desktop to work with in ArcMap.

I have run the topology editing tool, and it detected some slivers between the great lakes. I cleaned all the overlaps and gaps shown as errors. However, As I zoomed in further just to make sure everything is clean, I realized there were more tiny gaps between the units i have tried to validate the topology again and again, but cannot see those issues. Does anyone know why the Topology tool cannot detect these tiny slivers and how to fix them in an automated way?

Thanks!

Majory

[JakeSkinner · Accepted solution]

Hi Majory,

Try increasing the cluster tolerance to see if this will remove the gaps/slivers.  You can do this using the following tool:

Set Cluster Tolerance—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop 

You can then re-validate the topology.

[TimothyHales]

To add on to Jake's suggestion, what scale are you viewing these topology slivers?

[MajorySilisyene]

I was viewing at 1: 300 or lower. I later realized that initially when I was trying to change the cluster tolerance I was actually decreasing rather than increasing, so I got the same results all over and over.

[ChrisDonohue__GISP]

To expand on Timothy Hales question, be aware that that at a scale of 1:1 or less, what is seen on the screen is not representative of the data due to the limitations of the software.  So while one can zoom way in (like to 1:0.2), what is visible at that scale is not an accurate representation of the data.  So at less than 1:1 good data will often appear to have gaps and overlaps; however, they are not real despite seeming like issues.

Chris Donohue, GISP