Spatial Network Cleaning

In Arc you can build a geometric network and then check at the error table to look for bugs (for this you have to first delete the topology, and also the remove the roundabout that also produce a geometric network error).

The errors flagged up are common problems regardless of which GIS you use:

  • Features that have empty geometry,
  • features that contain multiple parts,
  • features that form a closed loop or have the same from and to junction,
  • features that have zero length,
  • Junctions coincident with an edge-feature vertex having a different z-value,
  • Standalone junctions; which are junctions not connected to any edges
  • features prevented from collapsing on themselves because their length is near the snapping tolerance

From my experience. Use only Linestring type of lines, build long as possible lines, require that every line has least 1 point shared with others, do not allow 0 length lines, require lines to be OGC Valid (no self intersecting etc). If you have events on lines (linear referencing) store gps point too, because there will be someone who doesn't understand concept and they will break data.

And last but not least, Do not let people update or insert bad data to master database and with promise that they fix it later, that will never happen.