Polygon reshaping issue

[BenCochrane]

Hi all,

I have recently taken on a piece of work that involves the reshaping of a large number of polygons that represent planning applications.  The polygons are often based around the extents of a properties and have been drawn by various people over a number of years to varying degrees of accuracy, often with missing or additional vertices to the vector base map they are based upon.

I need to reshape these so they align perfectly to the geometry of the vector base map and do not have gaps and overlaps between them. There are often multiple polygons sat on top of each other and thus far it has been the tedious process of selecting them individually and adding removing vertices in order to align them to the geometry below.

I am a somewhat novice ArcGIS user and am wondering if there is a more efficient way to carry out this process, retracing the boundaries in some cases is working but often as there are multiple polygons of only slightly different shapes sat on top of each other I am having a hard time tracing the base map below without having the trace tool pic up extra vertices I do not wish to be included or veering off the base laer I want my polygons to match.

If anyone has any advice on how to better carry out this task it would be much appreciated.

many thanks.

[rachelg_esri]

Hello Ben,

I would recommend that you take a look at the various Topology tools we have out-of-the-box. There are a number of rules you can set up specific to your scenario such as Must Not Overlap and Must Not Have Gaps, that would help you find the overlaps and gaps that you need to resolve.

Topology also allows you to modify shared boundaries, such as moving a line that two parcels share as borders, and modifying both polygons at the same time so that you aren't creating new gaps or overlaps.

It will take some editing to get to the point where all your data is properly connected, but once you do it the first time, things should be much smoother sailing going forward.

As for pulling data off of a vector basemap, unless you have access to the geometry of the basemap, we don't have an out-of-the-box way to match your lines up automatically to a basemap's information. We have ArcScan, which can convert scanned maps to features in some aspect, but I don't really think that's going to fit what you're looking for.

Here's a link to discussions bout Topology in ArcGIS for Desktop:

An overview of topology in ArcGIS—Help | ArcGIS Desktop 

Topology basics—Help | ArcGIS Desktop 

Topology in ArcGIS—Help | ArcGIS Desktop 

If you have an active Maintenance agreement, you should be able to freely access the following Web Course:

Getting Started with Geodatabase Topology---Web Course | Esri Academy 

Enjoy!

Best regards,

Rachel

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