Commonly, shapefiles are compressed in a. prj with the shapefile’s projection information.
All three files must be present in the same directory for them to be viewable. For example, shapefiles can be directly read by a number of GIS software programs such as ArcGIS and QGIS.ĭespite its name indicating a singular file, a shapefile is actually a collection of at least three basic files: .shp. Developed by Esri, shapefiles are now an open format and is a popular option for data transfer.
Shapefiles store non-topological vector data along with related attribute data. The shapefile format is now a common format for storing vector GIS data.
