Joining two sets of roads with no similar field

[CarlRoss]

Is there any way at all that two sets of roads, (one county, one city) can be joined in a way that a cross refernce can be performed on them? They each have plenty of attributes but each are named differently and they both use different identifying attributes.
They do follow the same path, at least relatively close, not exactly. They are linear referenced. Is there any type of geoprocessing that can be done to create a similar field. I was thinking about trying to use the intersect tool since both are relatively following the same path but not sure if it lead into anything or not.
Wondered if there may be any sort of scripting that cna create a common field since both are similar and have similar paths.
I doubt if there is any solution but if anyone knows of one....I would love to hear it.

[JoshuaDamron]

I don�??t have a complete answer for you but I do have some ideas. 

Bear with me for a sec as I rephrase your post as I�??m interpreting it, let me know if I got this right.  I assume the road data you are referring to is street center line data in a line format. Both the City and County keep separate sets of data, the county�??s is obviously on a macro scale.  You work for one of the agency�??s (City or County), and you want to make use of the data from the other agency for analysis purposes.

In the small city I work for we have come across a similar issue in that the City & County have documented different things with different purposes i.e. the County performs emergency response routing therefore they have fields for speed limits & addresses.  The City has fields for bike lane, General plan, street sweeping, trash pickup, etc.  All we do is scalp data from their dataset we are interested in via a street name join, we dump what ever data of theirs we don�??t want, including their line geometry as we like ours better :-).

I�??ve only used the intersect tool when I had a polygon in the mix, I�??ve never used it with just lines, I�??m not sure if it will work being that your lines don�??t necessarily share geometry (it seems like ideally you want to eliminate one set of lilnes and just transfer the data over to the other).  It only takes a few minutes to give it a try (depending on your file size).  I think a spatial join might be what you are looking for, though I�??ve never used it for lines that intersect.  I�??m not sure how it will work for you.  Let me know what you find that works 🙂

Someone else probably knows better than me but aside from a spatial join I don�??t know of a way to match up data with table lacking shared field data, I�??m not sure you could create a common identifier field unless it was done by hand.  You may consider performing a join between fields with the most similarity ( i.e. street names) then check and see how much hand cleanup work is required for the street names that don�??t match, this might be a good way to transfer the other agency�??s ID field to your data as a starting point.

Whatever you do ideally you can structure the task so as to not have to  duplicate each time the other agency updates their data.  You may consider contacting the other agency and seeing if you can both agree to maintain a common ID field.

Hopefully something in all of my rambling helped out a bit.

[AdrienLitton]

Carl,

What you're talking about is conflation.  Ideally, you would want to take the geometry of one dataset and append the attributes of the other by performing a feature by feature comparison.  This is a long and tedious process to perform manually and blanket geoprocessing tools such as intersect and spatial join don't always give you the results you're looking for.  Conflation is a highly specialized industry and there are only a limited number of vendors who do it well.  A quick search of our Business Partner Directory looking for solutions with the keyword "conflation" returned the following results:  http://www.esri.com/partners/apps/search/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.

[CarlRoss]

Actually, Ill explain this in a little more detail. I have a map of two features, roads, that are displayed simeultameously on the map. One feature is a "State Road" layer and the other is a 911 road feature. Many of these are the same set of roads but not exactly identical is shape, (altho they should be). I may have one road named 21/3 (Jones Run) as a state rd and the same road named Peach lane that is a 911 road. They ideally should be the exact same shape and place, but in reality on the map, they arent drawn exactly the same. They both have attribute tables with assorted info. But no two fields are the same in both features, altho they are taking up almost the same geometric space on the map. I need to take both sets of roads, and join or relate thethe attribute tables somehow. I didnt know if there was a way to use the fact that they both "should" be drawn in the same location to join them somehow. This sounds almost impossible to me but I thought I would give it a shot....ya never know.