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Importing an Esri Shapefile
The Esri Shapefile Format
The Esri shapefile is a popular format for geographic information systems (GIS). Shapefiles can describe polygons, polylines and points. Polygons can, for example, represent geographical regions like countries and states while polylines can represent roads, rivers and so on. Points are currently not used used in the shapefile importer.
A shapefile is a set of various files, three of these files are used by the shapefile importer.
- .shp — shape format; contains the shapes (polygons, polylines and points)
- .prj — projection format; contains the coordinate system and projection information
- .dbf — attribute format; contains attributes for each shape