CANADA-US MERGING PROCESS:
1) The Canadian and US coverage files in NAD83 Geographic Decimal Degrees format were appended using the "joincover" script taken from the ERSI website and developped by Sam Henderson . More information on script can be obtained from the following website <http://www.surv.ufl.edu/~sam/joincovers/index.htm> . This application prepares coverages with different attiributes for the APPEND command, it finds all possible items in the feature attribute tables and make them similar by adding and pulling. It does not drop any items and creates a file containing a "superset" of all attributes of the original files. Topology of vectors is updated using a dangle=0 and fuzzy tolerence=0.00001 (degrees) before appending.
2) Merged Canada-US roads was exported to Shapefile geographic decimal degrees for final distributes purposes.
3) Attributes correspondance was evaluated but is was decided not to crosswalk attributes. The full set of Canadian an US roads attributes were retained for the exeception of Canadian road attributes relating to feature metadata and some internal GIS attributes (see list below).
ORIGINAL URN ATTRIBUTES (width, output, type, n. dec):
ENTITYNAME (40,40,C,0)
NTS (6,6,C,0)
EDITION (8,16,F,3)
VERSION (8,16,F,3)
THEME (2,2,C,0)
ID (8,16,F,3)
CODE_GENER (8,16,F,3)
ATC (8,16,F,3)
ATG (8,16,F,3)
ATZ (8,16,F,3)
ATE (8,16,F,3)
ACCURACY (8,16,F,3)
CLASSIFICA (8,16,F,3)
SUPPORT (8,16,F,3)
SURFACE (8,16,F,3)
STATUS (8,16,F,3)
NB_LANES (8,16,F,3)
FIR_ROADNO (30,30,C,0)
SEC_ROADNO (30,30,C,0)
THI_ROADNO (30,30,C,0)
ELEVATION (8,31,F,3)
ORIGINAL GDT ATTRIBUTES (width, output, type, n. dec):
PREFIX (2,2,C,0)
NAME (30,30,C,0)
TYPE (4,4,C,0)
SUFFIX (2,2,C,0)
FCC (3,3,C,0
FIPS (11,11,C,0)
ATTRIBUTES SUPERSET (GDT + URN):
FNODE#
LPOLY#
RPOLY#
LENGTH
CAN_US_ROADS#
CAN_US_ROADS-ID
ENTITYNAME
NTS
EDITION
VERSION
THEME
ID
CODE_GENER
ATC
ATG
ATZ
ATE
ACCURACY
CLASSIFICA
SUPPORT
SURFACE
STATUS
NB_LANES
FIR_ROADNO
SEC_ROADNO
THI_ROADNO
ELEVATION
PREFIX
NAME
TYPE
SUFFIX
FCC
FIPS
RETAINED ATTRIBUTES:
GIS Software required -> FID, Shape
Canadian Road Attributes -> NTS, ID, ATC, CLASSIFICA, SUPPORT, SURFACE, STATUS, NB_LANES, FIR_ROADNO, SEC_ROADNO, THI_ROADNO,
US Road Attributes -> PREFIX, NAME, TYPE, SUFFIX, FCC, FIPS