A shapefile is a type of geographic layer which has data of some type, in tabular format, associated with geographic location data, usually in a form of a digital map. Shapefiles can only represent one kind of data (point, line, polygon, etc.), although each individual shape can have many attributes. Shapefiles use DBASE files (.dbf) to store their tables.
A vector data format for storing the location, shape, and attributes of geographic features. A shapefile is stored in a set of related files and contains one feature class, point, line or polygon.
a digital vector (non-topological) storage format for storing geometric location and associated attribute information
a file format used to store vector themes
a homogenous collection of simple features that do not contain topological information
a nontopological data structure that does not explicitly store topological relationships
a simple non-topological format that stores the geometry and attribute information for a set of geographic features as a set of vector (point, line, polygon) coordinates
a specially structured set of files that integrates the demographic and geographic data
a special simplified file structure for storing geographic features in Arcview
a specific structure/format for a map file such as a state by county (set of contiguous polygons each representing a county)
a standard of ESRI, which produces GIS products such as ArcView
spatial data format developed and used by ESRI for their ArcView software application.
Shapefiles are simple GIS vector files containing points, lines or areas. The format was designed and published by ESRI and is widely supported in the GIS world. It is effectively the native and highest performance format for MapServer.
A file format (.shp) used in ArcView GIS software to manage spatial data.
The ESRI Shapefile is a popular geospatial vector data format for geographic information systems software. It is developed and regulated by ESRI as a (mostly) open specification for data interoperability among ESRI and other software products. A "shapefile" commonly refers to a collection of files with ".shp", ".shx", ".dbf", and other extensions on a common prefix name (i.e., "lakes.*").
