Editing coincident features

When editing features, it's important to maintain the spatial relationships that exist among them. For example, when you edit the shared boundary between two land use features, you don't want to introduce a gap between the two. To prevent editing errors, you can create a topology.

The spatial relationship between two polygon features is distorted when edited incorrectly.

The primary purpose of a topology is to define spatial relationships between features. The primary spatial relationships that you can model using topology are adjacency, coincidence, and connectivity.

Adjacency allows you to identify which land owners or soil types share a common boundary with each other.

With coincidence, one boundary can lie on top of another. You can identify the bus routes on top of roads

Connectivity allows you to follow a path from the water treatment plant to a house or the flow of water through streams.

As you learned a few weeks ago, there are three types of topology available in a geodatabase: map topology, geodatabase topology, and topology in a geometric network.

The three types of topology are all similar in that the spatial relationships are based on coincident geometry. They differ in how they are created and maintained.