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:

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:


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