- Shapefile Viewer Free
- Shapefile Viewer Windows Xp
- Shapefile Viewer Windows 7
- Shapefile Viewer Windows 10
Shapefile attribute format (.dbf. This file stores the attributes for each shape; it uses the dBase IV format. An alternative format that can also be used is the xBase format, which has an open specification, and is used in open source shapefile libraries, such as the Shapefile C library. This is a great 3D ESRI shapefile (shp and shx) viewer. SHP is the native format for ArcGIS (ArcEdit, ArcView, etc) and is supported by many other GIS. SHP Viewer 3D for Windows 10.
Filename extensions | .shp , .shx , .dbf |
---|---|
Developed by | Esri |
Type of format | GIS |
Standard | Shapefile Technical Description |
The shapefile format is a geospatial vector data format for geographic information system (GIS) software. It is developed and regulated by Esri as a mostly open specification for data interoperability among Esri and other GIS software products.[1] The shapefile format can spatially describe vector features: points, lines, and polygons, representing, for example, water wells, rivers, and lakes. Each item usually has attributes that describe it, such as name or temperature.
- 1Overview
- 2Limitations
Overview[edit]
The shapefile format is a digital vector storage format for storing geometric location and associated attribute information. This format lacks the capacity to store topological information. The shapefile format was introduced with ArcView GIS version 2 in the early 1990s. It is now possible to read and write geographical datasets using the shapefile format with a wide variety of software.
The shapefile format stores the data as primitive geometric shapes like points, lines, and polygons. These shapes, together with data attributes that are linked to each shape, create the representation of the geographic data. The term 'shapefile' is quite common, but the format consists of a collection of files with a common filename prefix, stored in the same directory. The three mandatory files have filename extensions.shp
, .shx
, and .dbf
. The actual shapefile relates specifically to the .shp
file, but alone is incomplete for distribution as the other supporting files are required. Legacy GIS software may expect that the filename prefix be limited to eight characters to conform to the DOS 8.3 filename convention, though modern software applications accept files with longer names.
- Mandatory files
Shapefile Viewer Free
.shp
— shape format; the feature geometry itself.shx
— shape index format; a positional index of the feature geometry to allow seeking forwards and backwards quickly.dbf
— attribute format; columnar attributes for each shape, in dBase IV format
- Other files
.prj
— projection description, using a well-known text representation of coordinate reference systems.sbn
and.sbx
— a spatial index of the features.fbn
and.fbx
— a spatial index of the features that are read-only.ain
and.aih
— an attribute index of the active fields in a table.ixs
— a geocoding index for read-write datasets.mxs
— a geocoding index for read-write datasets (ODB format).atx
— an attribute index for the.dbf
file in the form of shapefile.columnname.atx
(ArcGIS 8 and later).shp.xml
— geospatial metadata in XML format, such as ISO 19115 or other XML schema.cpg
— used to specify the code page (only for.dbf
) for identifying the character encoding to be used.qix
— an alternative quadtree spatial index used by MapServer and GDAL/OGR software
In each of the .shp
, .shx
, and .dbf
files, the shapes in each file correspond to each other in sequence (i.e., the first record in the .shp
file corresponds to the first record in the .shx
and .dbf
files, etc.). The .shp
and .shx
files have various fields with different endianness, so an implementer of the file formats must be very careful to respect the endianness of each field and treat it properly.
Shapefile shape format (.shp
)[edit]
The main file (.shp
) contains the geometry data. The binary file consists of a single fixed-length header followed by one or more variable-length records. Each of the variable-length records includes a record-header component and a record-contents component. A detailed description of the file format is given in the ESRI Shapefile Technical Description.[1] This format should not be confused with the AutoCAD shape font source format, which shares the .shp
extension.
The 2D axis ordering of coordinate data assumes a Cartesian coordinate system, using the order (X Y) or (Easting Northing). This axis order is consistent for Geographic coordinate systems, where the order is similarly (longitude latitude). Geometries may also support 3- or 4-dimensional Z and M coordinates, for elevation and measure, respectively. A Z-dimension stores the elevation of each coordinate in 3D space, which can be used for analysis or for visualisation of geometries using 3D computer graphics. The user-defined M dimension can be used for one of many functions, such as storing linear referencing measures or relative time of a feature in 4D space.
The main file header is fixed at 100 bytes in length and contains 17 fields; nine 4-byte (32-bit signed integer or int32) integer fields followed by eight 8-byte (double) signed floating point fields:
Bytes | Type | Endianness | Usage |
---|---|---|---|
0–3 | int32 | big | File code (always hex value 0x0000270a) |
4–23 | int32 | big | Unused; five uint32 |
24–27 | int32 | big | File length (in 16-bit words, including the header) |
28–31 | int32 | little | Version |
32–35 | int32 | little | Shape type (see reference below) |
36–67 | double | little | Minimum bounding rectangle (MBR) of all shapes contained within the dataset; four doubles in the following order: min X, min Y, max X, max Y |
68–83 | double | little | Range of Z; two doubles in the following order: min Z, max Z |
84–99 | double | little | Range of M; two doubles in the following order: min M, max M |
The file then contains any number of variable-length records. Each record is prefixed with a record header of 8 bytes:
Bytes | Type | Endianness | Usage |
---|---|---|---|
0–3 | int32 | big | Record number (1-based) |
4–7 | int32 | big | Record length (in 16-bit words) |
Following the record header is the actual record:
Bytes | Type | Endianness | Usage |
---|---|---|---|
0–3 | int32 | little | Shape type (see reference below) |
4– | – | – | Shape content |
The variable-length record contents depend on the shape type, which must be either the shape type given in the file header or Null. The following are the possible shape types:
Value | Shape type | Fields |
---|---|---|
0 | Null shape | None |
1 | Point | X, Y |
3 | Polyline | MBR, Number of parts, Number of points, Parts, Points |
5 | Polygon | MBR, Number of parts, Number of points, Parts, Points |
8 | MultiPoint | MBR, Number of points, Points |
11 | PointZ | X, Y, Z Optional: M |
13 | PolylineZ | Mandatory: MBR, Number of parts, Number of points, Parts, Points, Z range, Z array Optional: M range, M array |
15 | PolygonZ | Mandatory: MBR, Number of parts, Number of points, Parts, Points, Z range, Z array Optional: M range, M array |
18 | MultiPointZ | Mandatory: MBR, Number of points, Points, Z range, Z array Optional: M range, M array |
21 | PointM | X, Y, M |
23 | PolylineM | Mandatory: MBR, Number of parts, Number of points, Parts, Points Optional: M range, M array |
25 | PolygonM | Mandatory: MBR, Number of parts, Number of points, Parts, Points Optional: M range, M array |
28 | MultiPointM | Mandatory: MBR, Number of points, Points Optional Fields: M range, M array |
31 | MultiPatch | Mandatory: MBR, Number of parts, Number of points, Parts, Part types, Points, Z range, Z array Optional: M range, M array |
Shapefile shape index format (.shx
)[edit]
The index contains the same 100-byte header as the .shp
file, followed by any number of 8-byte fixed-length records which consist of the following two fields:
Bytes | Type | Endianness | Usage |
---|---|---|---|
0–3 | int32 | big | Record offset (in 16-bit words) |
4–7 | int32 | big | Record length (in 16-bit words) |
Using this index, it is possible to seek backwards in the shapefile by, first, seeking backwards in the shape index (which is possible because it uses fixed-length records), then reading the record offset, and using that offset to seek to the correct position in the .shp
file. It is also possible to seek forwards an arbitrary number of records using the same method.
Shapefile attribute format (.dbf
)[edit]
This file stores the attributes for each shape; it uses the dBase IV format. An alternative format that can also be used is the xBase format, which has an open specification, and is used in open source shapefile libraries, such as the Shapefile C library.[2]
The names and values of attributes are not standardized, and will be different depending on the source of the shapefile.
Shapefile spatial index format (.sbn
)[edit]
This is a binary spatial index file, which is used only by Esri software. The format is not documented by Esri. However it has been reverse-engineered and documented [3] by the open source community. It is not currently implemented by other vendors. The .sbn
file is not strictly necessary, since the .shp
file contains all of the information necessary to successfully parse the spatial data.
Limitations[edit]
Topology and the shapefile format[edit]
The shapefile format does not have the ability to store topological information. The ESRI ArcInfo coverages and personal/file/enterprise geodatabases do have the ability to store feature topology.
Spatial representation[edit]
The edges of a polyline or polygon are composed of points. The spacing of the points implicitly determines the scale at which the feature is useful visually. Exceeding that scale results in jagged representation. Additional points would be required to achieve smooth shapes at greater scales. For features better represented by smooth curves, the polygon representation requires much more data storage than, for example, splines, which can capture smoothly varying shapes efficiently. None of the shapefile format types supports splines.
Data storage[edit]
The size of both .shp
and .dbf
component files cannot exceed 2 GB (or 231 bytes) — around 70 million point features at best.[4] The maximum number of feature for other geometry types varies depending on the number of vertices used.
The attribute database format for the .dbf
component file is based on an older dBase standard. This database format inherently has a number of limitations:[4]
- While the current dBase standard, and GDAL/OGR (the main open source software library for reading and writing shapefile format datasets) support null values, ESRI software represents these values as zeros — a very serious issue for analyzing quantitative data, as it may skew representation and statistics if null quantities are represented as zero
- Poor support for Unicode field names or field storage
- Maximum length of field names is 10 characters
- Maximum number of fields is 255
- Supported field types are: floating point (13 character storage), integer (4 or 9 character storage), date (no time storage; 8 character storage), and text (maximum 254 character storage)
- Floating point numbers may contain rounding errors since they are stored as text
Mixing shape types[edit]
Because the shape type precedes each geometry record, a shapefile is physically capable of storing a mixture of different shape types. However, the specification states, 'All the non-Null shapes in a shapefile are required to be of the same shape type.' Therefore, this ability to mix shape types must be limited to interspersing null shapes with the single shape type declared in the file's header. A shapefile must not contain both polyline and polygon data, for example, the descriptions for a well (point), a river (polyline), and a lake (polygon) would be stored in three separate datasets.
See also[edit]
- Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo)
External links[edit]
- Shapefile file extensions – Esri Webhelp docs for ArcGIS 10.0 (2010)
- shapelib.maptools.org – Free c library for reading/writing shapefiles
- Python Shapefile Library – Open Source (MIT License) Python library for reading/writing shapefiles
- Shapefile Projection Finder - Detect unknown projection of a shapefile automatically[5][6]
References[edit]
- ^ abESRI (July 1998). 'ESRI Shapefile Technical Description'(PDF). Retrieved 2007-07-04.Cite journal requires
|journal=
(help) - ^'Shapefile C Library V1.2'.
- ^'Wayback Machine'(PDF). 13 August 2016. Archived from the original on 13 August 2016.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
- ^ ab'ArcGIS Desktop 9.3 Help – Geoprocessing considerations for shapefile output'. Esri. April 24, 2009.
- ^Egger, Manfred. 'Shapefile Projectionfinder'(PDF). www.egger-gis.at.
- ^'Shapefile Projectionfinder'.
The free AvisMap Viewer opens most GIS/CAD and raster image file types and most ArcView, ArcExplorer, and MapInfo projects. Besides just opening and viewing files, the Viewer supports an extensive list of features including visual layer properties control, legend control, thematic mapping, spatial and attribute querying, custom labeling, on-map measurements, hyper-linking, PDF export and much more.
Because the GIS Viewer is compiled from the AvisMap Map Engine, it provides an easy way to evaluate the AvisMap technology and support for various data formats and common GIS functionality. The free Viewer can be used to generate AvisMap project files that are compatible with any other AvisMap product or custom applications created from the AvisMap GIS Engine.
The AvisMap Desktop product extends the free Viewer by adding an extensive set of features for editing, digitizing, merging, exporting, converting (between formats), building/correcting map topology, etc. GIS shapefile map data.
AvisMap Viewer feature summary:
* Open/read data in the following file formats:
- Raster image: TIFF/GeoTIFF, ECW/ECWP, MrSID, JPEG2000, JPEG, IMG, BMP, BIL/SPOT, PNG, CADRG, CIB,
AvisMapPixelStore
- Vector: SHP, E00, MIF/MID, TAB, DXF, DGN, TIGER, GML, KML, VPF, GDF, DLG, SDTS, GPX,
Geomedia SQL Server & Access Warehouses, SQL DB Layers: Geomedia SQL Server & Access Warehouse,
per OPENGIS Simple Features for SQL implementation, AvisMap binary
- DTM formats: ESRI ASCII GRID, Surfer ASCII Grid (DSAA), FLOAT GRID, BT, DTED, and ADF
- Georeferenced Images: GeoTIFF, World File, and TAB based
* All formats supported natively, with no importing of data to any internal format
* Open data in many different formats in the same project, with no need for format conversion
- Free Shapefile Viewer Free & Safe Download!
- Free Shapefile Viewer Latest Version!
- Works with All Windows versions
- Users choice!
Free Shapefile Viewer is a product developed by Avismap Gis Technologies. This site is not directly affiliated with Avismap Gis Technologies. All trademarks, registered trademarks, product names and company names or logos mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.
All informations about programs or games on this website have been found in open sources on the Internet. All programs and games not hosted on our site. When visitor click 'Download now' button files will downloading directly from official sources(owners sites). QP Download is strongly against the piracy, we do not support any manifestation of piracy. If you think that app/game you own the copyrights is listed on our website and you want to remove it, please contact us. We are DMCA-compliant and gladly to work with you. Please find the DMCA / Removal Request below.
Please include the following information in your claim request:
- Identification of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed;
- An exact description of where the material about which you complain is located within the QPDownload.com;
- Your full address, phone number, and email address;
- A statement by you that you have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
- A statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the owner of the copyright interest involved or are authorized to act on behalf of that owner;
- Your electronic or physical signature.
Shapefile Viewer Windows Xp
You may send an email to support [at] qpdownload.com for all DMCA / Removal Requests.
You can find a lot of useful information about the different software on our QP Download Blog page.
Latest Posts:
How do I uninstall Free Shapefile Viewer in Windows Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8?
- Click 'Start'
- Click on 'Control Panel'
- Under Programs click the Uninstall a Program link.
- Select 'Free Shapefile Viewer' and right click, then select Uninstall/Change.
- Click 'Yes' to confirm the uninstallation.
How do I uninstall Free Shapefile Viewer in Windows XP?
- Click 'Start'
- Click on 'Control Panel'
- Click the Add or Remove Programs icon.
- Click on 'Free Shapefile Viewer', then click 'Remove/Uninstall.'
- Click 'Yes' to confirm the uninstallation.
How do I uninstall Free Shapefile Viewer in Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000?
Shapefile Viewer Windows 7
- Click 'Start'
- Click on 'Control Panel'
- Double-click the 'Add/Remove Programs' icon.
- Select 'Free Shapefile Viewer' and right click, then select Uninstall/Change.
- Click 'Yes' to confirm the uninstallation.
Shapefile Viewer Windows 10
- How much does it cost to download Free Shapefile Viewer?
- How do I access the free Free Shapefile Viewer download for PC?
- Will this Free Shapefile Viewer download work on Windows?
Nothing! Download Free Shapefile Viewer from official sites for free using QPDownload.com. Additional information about license you can found on owners sites.
It's easy! Just click the free Free Shapefile Viewer download button at the top left of the page. Clicking this link will start the installer to download Free Shapefile Viewer free for Windows.
Yes! The free Free Shapefile Viewer download for PC works on most current Windows operating systems.