If you wanted to add an attribute Neighborhood to points of hospitals, which technique would you use?

If you wanted to add an attribute Neighborhood to points of hospitals, which technique would you use?

• A. Spatial filtering
• B. Overlay
• C. Spatial joining
• D. Nearest neighbor

Answer: (C)

This tests how to transfer attributes between layers based on where features are located. To add a Neighborhood attribute to each hospital point, you need to relate every point to the neighborhood polygon that contains it and copy that polygon’s neighborhood field onto the point. This is exactly what a spatial join does: it matches features across layers using a spatial relationship (a point within a polygon) and appends the polygon’s attributes to the point feature. Other options wouldn’t achieve this goal. Spatial filtering just selects features by location without transferring attributes. Overlay combines layers into a new set of geometries but isn’t typically used to attach an attribute from one layer to another’s features. Nearest neighbor would assign attributes based on the closest feature, which could yield the wrong neighborhood for a point that lies inside a specific polygon, whereas containment ensures the correct neighborhood is assigned.

This tests how to transfer attributes between layers based on where features are located. To add a Neighborhood attribute to each hospital point, you need to relate every point to the neighborhood polygon that contains it and copy that polygon’s neighborhood field onto the point. This is exactly what a spatial join does: it matches features across layers using a spatial relationship (a point within a polygon) and appends the polygon’s attributes to the point feature.

Other options wouldn’t achieve this goal. Spatial filtering just selects features by location without transferring attributes. Overlay combines layers into a new set of geometries but isn’t typically used to attach an attribute from one layer to another’s features. Nearest neighbor would assign attributes based on the closest feature, which could yield the wrong neighborhood for a point that lies inside a specific polygon, whereas containment ensures the correct neighborhood is assigned.