I have two shapefiles that I want to merge.
One is of polygons, the other is a point file.
The polygons are missing information in the attribute table that the point file has. In general, the two line up pretty well, but others are not so exact.
What would be the most efficient way of merging these two shapefiles to have all of the information I need?
More information: I'm working on a historic mapping of my University's campus. The current edition has a point file for the buildings around campus, with years built, razed, building name, etc.
I want to instead use a polygon file and have building footprints. I contacted the university, and was given a shapefile that has the footprints.
However, none of the building have any information associated with them, including the name or building number.
My goal is to be able to name the building footprints in the most efficient way possible.
The problem is, there are no matching fields, and the only matching information I have is the actual location.
Best Answer
You can't merge points to polygons, but certainly a spatial join will merge the attributes of the two, no?
You can right click on the polygon layer and choose (in Arcmap) join. Then in the "VERY" top pulldown choose join based on location.
Then choose the point file for the features to join.
You can then choose to have all the nearest points joined with a distance or only one point joined.
NOTE: that if you have more than 1 point inside a polygon you will have a lot of cleanup to do.