Sliver Polygon

A sliver polygon is a very thin or unusual small polygon that arises incidentally while performing GIS layer overlay operations. Such artifacts usually arise due to a discrepancy in the borders between the two data layers, which leads to generation of tiny gaps or overlapping regions while performing overlay operations on these spatial layers. Sliver polygons may appear owing to digitization mistakes, discrepancies in coordinates, mismatched vertices, and variations in the quality of source data layers. Sliver polygons frequently occur while working with cadastral, land use, administrative, and environmental data layers. Although each particular sliver may not possess any significant geographic meaning, they may affect the calculations made in terms of spatial statistics, add extra features to the dataset and make the further GIS operations difficult.