An overview of the Overlay Tools

The Overlay Tools provides a series of tools that allows you to perform some basic overlay operations on the layers. This toolset includes tools that will allow you to perform erase, identity and update operations.

The following table lists the tools available in the Overlay Tools and provides a brief description of each.

Tool	Description
Erase Features	Erases features that are within or coincident with overlaying features.
Identity	Assigns attributes from one layer to the overlapping features of another layer. An output dataset with attributes selected from both input layers will be created.
Update Polygon Layer	Updates one polygon layer by another overlapping polygons that replace the area they overlap in the input feature class. Updating operation is similar to erasing, except that the input features that overlap the updating extent are updated instead of being erased.