Creating Polylines from Point Data in ArcGIS

ArcGIS users are quite familiar with adding point data in a form of shapefile from XY data (e.g. Lat/Lon entity). However, if there is a question of creating line or polyline data from those point shapefile, most of the GIS users have to think about it for a while. In my knowledge, I didn't find any built-in function to create polyline shapefile from point shapefile with a specific connectivity objectives. Or, If I say, creating polygon from point data, most of GIS users would agree with me regarding the possible challenges in doing so, using ArcGIS solely. However, in practice we do need to create line entity from point entity. For example, if we have the start and end coordinates of a fluid pipeline ( e.g. water, oil, or gas supply line) and we need do show the pipelines in a map, most of the GIS users will first create the point shapefiles using the coordinate and then probably create a line shapefile separately to connect those points. But how about thousands, or even more pipelines? In this post I'll try to show how we are going to solve this sort of problem using an wonderful tool ET GeoWizard. 

Bangladesh Transverse Mercator (BTM) Projection

In this post I'll try to give a very brief overview of Bangladesh Transverse Mercator (BTM) projection system and necessary parameters of BTM, along with the projection file (BTM.prj) that can be used directly into ArcGIS 9.x or later versions.

Geographic Information System (GIS) users are quite familiar of Map Projection, which is the method to represent the three dimensional earth surface into a two dimensional plane. Universal Mercator Projection (UTM) is a widely used projection system now-a-days in which the earth (between 80°S and 84°N latitude) is divided into sixty zones, each a six-degree band of longitude, and a secant transverse Mercator projection is used in each zone. For example, zone 1 covers longitude 180° to 174° W and then zone numbering increases eastward to zone 60 that covers longitude 174 to 180 East. In a zone, the coordinate of a point is given by the Northing and Easting. The intersection of the equator and the UTM zone's central meridian is considered as the point of origin of each UTM zone and the central meridian of each zone is set at 500,000 meters East to avoid negative numbers.

Creating Shapefiles from Google Earth

I was working on a research paper on the South Saskatchewan River Basin in Alberta, Canada and I needed to show all the major water reservoirs and lakes in the basin map. I tried to get that information through different sources; however, I did not able to collect all reservoir polygons.  Then I thought, why don't I try to extract those reservoirs maps from Google Earth and then find some way to convert those polygons to shape file format in ArcGIS. As Google Earth extracted map has geo-referencing in it, I thought definitely there are some ways to do it. Then I browsed through net and find a very useful tool which can convert the Google Earth extracted polygons/lines/points to relevant shapefiles with the aid of ArcGIS. As I find it helpful, I'll try to explain the procedure with example so that other fellows working on similar problem may get help from this post.