Shapefile

The shapefile , or " file of formes" is a format of file resulting from the world of the Geographical Information systems (or SIG).
Initialement developed by ESRI for its commercial software, this format from now on became a standard de facto, and largely used by a great number of free software (MapServer, Grass, Udig, MapGuide OpenSource…) like owners.

It contains all the related information with the geometry of the described objects, which can be:

of the points
of the lines
of the polygons

Its extension is classically SHP, and it is always accompanied by two other of the same files name, and by extensions:

a file DBF, which contains the data assignees relating to the objects contained in the shapefile
a file SHX, which stores the index of the geometry

Other files can be also provided:

.sbn and .sbx - space index of the forms.
.fbn and .fbx - space index of the forms for the shapefile in reading alone
.ain and .aih - index of the attibuts of the active fields in a table or a table of attributes of the topic.
.prj - information on the frame of reference, using the format WKT (Well Known Text).
.sh p.xml - metadata of the shapefile.
.atx - file of index of the attributes for the file dbf, in the form ..atx (ArcGIS 8 and following)
.qix

See too

http://www.mapshaper.org/: tool of edition, simplification and generalization of shapefile on line.

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