Use Clipping to Create New Features

Clipping is a common technique in GIS to help process data. It allows you to “cut data” or take subset of data for a particular area of interest. Consider a cookie cutter as a tool to cut out one or many features from a layer to create a new feature layer that would only contain the features within the given area. For a more in-depth explanation visit the following clip article.

It is very helpful to create and reduce your data, real world examples may include:

• You have a large dataset such as land parcels or points of interest for an entire state, however you only need the data for a specific county. You can use the county feature to cut out only the land parcels or points of interest for the county you are interested in.

• You want to create a new polygon layer (for example a land parcel) and it will be next to a detailed body of water; you can generally draw the land parcel and then use the detailed water layer to cut out the parts that should not be included in the new land parcel.

Various geometric function APIs including clipping are available across all Map Suite products. An online demo for these various functions can be found here. Developers can download the sample from GitHub to start building their app now.

Non-developers can download the Map Suite GIS Editor to start using the clipping functionality to add/ create new data. A complete overview on how to use this feature is available under the GIS Editor wiki.