The main File Header starts from the beginning of the file and is 100 bytes in length. The fixed-length file header is followed by variable-length records where every record is made up of a fixed-length record header followed by variable-length record contents. shp file consists of headers and records. Open specifications of shapefile are available online from ESRI in the form of Technical Description and elaborates the overall structure of the file in detail. There can be other optional files as well that share the same name as the main file.
dbf file - a dBASE file that stores all the attributes of the shapes in the main file.In order to make sense of the information contained in such a file, a shapefile makes use of following additional mandatory files. Associated FilesĪ standalone shp file can not be used by software applications to make meaning of the data it contains.
For example, a shapefile containing cities of Los Angeles can have city name and temperature as attributes which gives meaningful representation to the spatial data. Each vector feature can have attributes that actually define the purpose of that feature. These features in combination can represent almost any type of shapes like water wells, country boundaries, spatial points, rivers flow, lakes, etc. Data RepresentationĪs mentioned, a shapefile format describes geospatial information of a data set as vector features.
The format has been developed as open specifications in order to facilitate interoperability between ESRI and other software products. It represents Geospatial information in the form of vector data to be used by Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications. SHP is the file extension for one of the primary file types used for representation of ESRI Shapefile.
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