April 2018
Beginner to intermediate
440 pages
11h 36m
English
The shapefile is probably the most often-used data format for geographical vector data today. This file format was developed by Esri, based on a mostly open specification for data interoperability among Esri and other GIS software products. Although many other file formats have been introduced in an attempt to replace the shapefile, it remains a widely-used file format. These days, many third-party programming modules in Python exist for reading and writing shapefiles.
Although the name shapefile might suggest that there's only one file associated with it, a single shapefile requires in fact at least three files that need to be stored in the same directory in order to work correctly: