Are there any tools, libraries, plugins, either standalone or for use with ArcGIS Pro that can aid in the process of identifying very similar points between two layers?
What I mean with similar
I mean points that may be located close by and may have similar values in string attributes. For example, two points 10 meters away labeled "STARBUCKS COFFEE SHOP" and "Star bucks (Street Mall)". These points are supposed to represent the same location, but are not identical.
My specific problem
I have thousands of points collected from various different sources. These sources are supposed to represent the same data but were collected by different people using different methods. As expected, points do not match up perfectly, some have slightly different labels, no dataset is complete and all of them have points that are not available in other layers.
What I'm trying to achieve is aggregate all these layers into a single layer, hopefully identifying and deleting points that represent the same location ("duplicate" points) in order to clean it up.
Currently, I'm doing the following:
- Load the two layers (A and B) into ArcGIS Pro
- Use the "Select Layer By Location" tool to find all points in layer A that are 5 meters away from any point in layer B and save them into a new layer.
- Do the same to find points in layer B that are close to points in layer A.
- Remove these points from their original layers.
- Manually zoom in to located points and inspect their attributes. If the attributes are similar, delete one of them. If not, leave them as they are.
- When finished, aggregate layers A and B and the edited layers into a single layer.
- Repeat this with a bigger search radius (10 meters, 15 m, etc.).
- Repeat this for all other location types.
Needless to say, this is extremely tedious and time consuming, especially the parts with dealing with selecting layers, selecting points, creating new layers, renaming them and such.
What I've found that didn't help
- ArcGIS Similarity Search: Only works with numeric fields, not similar strings.
- Finding redundancy between two layers: It's about identical points.
- Finding and merging duplicate points in ArcGIS Desktop?: Only takes distance into consideration, which doesn't help make sure points are in fact representing the same location.
Note: I'm a GIS beginner, but a programmer by profession. I've been contemplating building a custom web application for this, but sounds like overkill for what I would consider a rather common task.
