I am thinking about adopting the Local Government Info Model for my road network but I don't understand why the attributes are all separate feature classes. Looking at the data dictionary there doesn't seem to be a relationship between such things as surface type, number of lands, speed limit etc with the road itself. I intend to combine these into one layer called Street so that it makes more sense. Then of course separate layers could be created in the TOC but would easily relate to each other.
Sometimes there is no need to have attributes kept with geometry permanently. It affords the opportunity to combine other attributes to the geometry without having everything all in one basket. This is what joins and relates are about...temporary until needed to be permanent. If you need something permanent, then make a separate copy with geometry and the desired attribute(s) combined.
I understand that, but there is very little attribute information with these other feature classes, in fact, I'm not even sure how I would do a join or relate based on the data dictionary as there is no unique id. Of course this could be added fairly easily but the idea of the this model is that you shouldn't have to do that much tweaking to make things work.
