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About ESRI Shapefiles
Shapefile is a file format for storing geographic vector data and associated attributes. Originally introduced by ESRI in its ArcGIS products, Shapefile has become a popular format for distributing data about geographic points, lines, and boundaries.
A "Shapefile" is technically a collection of related files. At a minimum a Shapefile contains:
- A file ending in .shp (which contains the raw vector data)
- A file ending in .dbf (which contains optional feature attributes, such as country name)
- A file ending in .shx (which is used to speed up reading the .shp file)
Usually these files are distributed together as a ZIP archive which needs to be extracted before being imported into Magic Maps.
If the vector data is stored in projected coordinates rather than geographic (latitude/longitude) coordinates, the Shapefile will have an additional file, called a PRJ file.
See also: