Clipping a Shapefile - Extracting of Data
|
Click here to download the data that the author used for the course lesson. By downloading the data you will be able to follow the steps completely.
|
Concept
Extraction of data is a process of selecting a part of a larger data set. Clipping a shapefile uses a boundary file, which must be a closed feature, like a county or state border. The content outside of the selected boundary will be removed. The clipping surface must be a polygon. A new shapefile will be created and must use an appropriate naming convention and storage location. For example: if a shapefile containing roads for an entire state is available, but only the roads of a single county is needed in a project, then the county boundary shapefile would be used as the clipping surface for the state road file. The newly created shapefile should have the name of the state, county and then roads saved in an appropriate folder or geodatabase. The name might look like KY_Mason_roads. The new shapefile will contain only the roads for the selected county along with their attributes.