Is there a way to shift/offset Point Data?

[EllieHakari]

Hello Everyone,

I am handling millions of points right now (showing temperature and stiffness of roads). My office would like to give them an offset from the actual road so that you can see all the data at the same time. Example: One set of data offset 10ft, next set offset 20ft, etc. The problem is that this is point data, and that means it has no reference to how it should be offset. My coworker currently has each individual symbol in each data-set offset. This results in a slant in the data like this:

                                                                  Data 3-------------------------------------------------------------

                                                        Data 2--------------------------------------------------------------------

                                               Data 1---------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                     Road-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                             Other Data 1---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                      Other Data 2---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

              Other Data 3----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All the data should be starting at the same place (relative to the "road" layer"). How can we accomplish this?

[ScottFierro2]

While this doesn't hit exactly what you are trying to do it may start you down the right path. Either of these is a bit old but goes to show how long this has been a speed bump.

https://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2007/08/27/displaying-coincident-points/

https://community.esri.com/thread/50340

[EllieHakari]

Thank you, I will take a look. I am completely stumped. And because of the amount of data, my computer is too.

[EllieHakari]

I tried what the first article suggested, but I couldn't even get the labels to load. I think I am dealing with too many points to go that route. As for the second link, I am going off of a local coordinate system, so I don't know how well that will work.

[Anonymous User]

Ellie,

One way to get the points offset the way you want is to turn the points into events. Events have a horizontal offset capability that would allow you to show the points as an offset from the road. The Locate Features on Route GeoProcessing tool can be used to convert features into events. The challenge you are going to run into is performance. Millions of points is difficult to display and events will even be slower. You could always export the events back to features for display. I think the horizontal offset will be preserved in the resulting feature. You might need to test that one. After that you might want to use something like map caching to make it easy for people to view the data.

Another thought I am having is that visualizing these millions of points isn't really the best way to work with this data. Even if you could visualize this much data quickly, it would be hard to get the information that you want out of the data. You likely want to be able to query the data for certain temperature and stiffens conditions and see the portions of the road highlighted where those conditions are met. One way to do this is to attach the data to segments of the roadway that can be queried. But with very large volumes of data, this can be difficult. You can also use big data tools to work with this data. I know Kentucky has done work like this. Right now the Esri big data tools are more for developers. At 10.5 those tools will be more accessible to everyone through GeoProcessing. If you like I'd be happy to talk with you sometime about the best approach for analyzing this data.