An overview of the Linear Referencing toolbox

Organizations that collect data about linear features, such as highways, city streets, railroads, rivers, pipelines, and water and sewer networks often use linear referencing systems to store data. A linear reference system stores data using a relative position along existing line features. That is, location is given in terms of a known linear feature and a position, or measure, along it. For example, route I-10, mile 23.2, uniquely identifies a position in geographic space, and can be used instead of an x,y coordinate.

When data is linearly referenced, multiple sets of attributes can be associated with any portion of an existing linear feature, independent of its beginning and end. These attributes can be displayed, queried, edited, and analyzed without affecting the underlying linear feature's geometry.

The Linear Referencing toolbox contains a series of tools for creating, calibrating, and displaying the data used for linear referencing.

Tool	Description
Calibrate Routes	Recalculates route measures using points.
Create Routes	Creates routes from existing lines. The input line features that share a common identifier are merged to create a single route.
Dissolve Route Events	Removes redundant information from event tables or separates event tables having more than one descriptive attribute into individual tables.
Locate Features Along Routes	Computes the intersection of input features (point, line, or polygon) and route features and writes the route and measure information to a new event table.
Make Route Event Layer	Creates a temporary feature layer using routes and route events.
Overlay Route Events	Overlays two event tables to create an output event table that represents the union or intersection of the input.
Transform Route Events	This tool transforms the measures of events from one route reference to another and writes them to a new event table.

Linear Referencing tools