GIS file format

Fish & Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management), and new GIS software companies such as Esri and Intergraph, each program was built around its own proprietary (and often secret) file format.

The most notable example of this was the publication of the Esri Shapefile format,[5] which by the late 1990s had become the most popular de facto standard for data sharing by the entire geospatial industry.

Over a hundred distinct formats have been created for the storage of spatial data, of which 20-30 are currently in common usage for different purposes.

Common examples include remote sensing imagery, terrain/elevation, population density, weather and climate, soil properties, and many others.

to binary large object (BLOB) data stored directly in a relational database management system (RDBMS) similar to other vector-based feature classes.

Typically, a single dataset collects information about a set of closely related or similar objects, such as all of the roads in a city.

Many data structures have been developed to encode these primitives as digital data, but most modern vector file formats are based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Simple Features specification, often directly incorporating its Well-known text (WKT) or Well-known binary (WKB) encodings.

Since the 1970s, almost all vector file formats have adopted the relational database model, either in principle or directly incorporating RDBMS software.

[8]: 46–49  Conversely, non-topological or spaghetti data (such as the Esri Shapefile and most spatial databases) includes no topology information, with each geometry being completely independent of all others.

Formats commonly in current usage: Historical formats seldom used today: There are some important advantages and disadvantages to using a raster or vector data model to represent reality: Modern object–relational databases can now store a variety of complex data using the binary large object datatype, including both raster grids and vector geometries.