An overview of the Overlay Operations toolset

The Overlay Operations toolset 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, update, intersect and near operations.

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

Tool	Description
Intersection Points	Intersects two input layers and outputs intersection points.
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.
Find Nearest Features	Finds the nearest features from the same or other near datasets and adds fields with calculated proximity parameters to the input dataset.
Find Nearest Features (Spider Diagram)	Finds the nearest features from the same or other near datasets, calculates distances and additional proximity details and creates Spider diagram lines between nearest features.
Find Nearest Features (New Table)	Finds the nearest features from the same or other near datasets and adds fields with calculated proximity parameters to a new table.