GIS File Formats
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GIS File Formats
A GIS file format or geospatial file format is a standard for encoding geographical information into a computer file. It is a specialized type of file format for use in geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing image processing tools, and other geospatial applications. Since the 1970s, dozens of formats have been created based on various Data model (GIS), data models for various purposes. They have been created by government mapping agencies (such as the USGS or National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency), GIS software vendors, standards bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium, informal user communities, and even individual developers. History The first GIS installations of the 1960s, such as the Canada Geographic Information System were based on bespoke software and stored data in bespoke file structures designed for the needs of the particular project. As more of these appeared, they could be compared to find best practices and common structures. When general-purpos ...
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Geographical Information
Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also called geospatial data and information, georeferenced data and information, as well as geodata and geoinformation. Location information (known by the many names mentioned here) is stored in a geographic information system (GIS). There are also many different types of geodata, including vector graphics, vector files, raster graphics, raster files, geographic databases, web files, and multi-temporal data. Spatial data or spatial information is broader class of data whose geometry is relevant but it is not necessarily georeferenced, such as in computer-aided design (CAD), see geometric modeling. Fields of study Geographic data and information are the subject of a number of overlapping fields of study, mainly: * Geocomputation * Geographic info ...
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World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system". Documents and other media content are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers. Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through character strings called uniform resource locators (URLs). The original and still very common document type is a web page formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This markup lang ...
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Binary File
A binary file is a computer file that is not a text file. The term "binary file" is often used as a term meaning "non-text file". Many binary file formats contain parts that can be interpreted as text; for example, some computer document files containing formatted text, such as older Microsoft Word document files, contain the text of the document but also contain formatting information in binary form. Background and terminology All modern computers store information in the form of bits (binary digits), using binary code. For this reason, all data stored on a computer is, in some sense, "binary". However, one particularly useful and ubiquitous type of data stored on a computer is one in which the bits represent text, by way of a character encoding. Those files are called " text files" and files which are not like that are referred to as "binary files", as a sort of retronym or hypernym. Some "text files" contain portions that are actually binary data, and many "binary fil ...
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JSON
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of name–value pairs and array data type, arrays (or other serialization, serializable values). It is a commonly used data format with diverse uses in electronic data interchange, including that of web applications with server (computing), servers. JSON is a Language-independent specification, language-independent data format. It was derived from JavaScript, but many modern programming languages include code to generate and parse JSON-format data. JSON filenames use the extension .json. Douglas Crockford originally specified the JSON format in the early 2000s. Transcript: He and Chip Morningstar sent the first JSON message in April 2001. Naming and pronunciation The 2017 international standard (ECMA-404 and ISO/IEC 21778:2017) ...
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Text File
A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flat file) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operating systems such as CP/M, where the operating system does not keep track of the file size in bytes, the end of a text file is denoted by placing one or more special characters, known as an end-of-file (EOF) marker, as padding after the last line in a text file. In modern operating systems such as DOS, Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, text files do not contain any special EOF character, because file systems on those operating systems keep track of the file size in bytes. Some operating systems, such as Multics, Unix-like systems, CP/M, DOS, the classic Mac OS, and Windows, store text files as a sequence of bytes, with an end-of-line delimiter at the end of each line. Other operating systems, such as OpenVMS and OS/360 an ...
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GeoJSON
GeoJSON is an open standard format designed for representing simple geographical features, along with their non-spatial attributes. It is based on the JSON format. The features include points (therefore addresses and locations), line strings (therefore streets, highways and boundaries), polygons (countries, provinces, tracts of land), and multi-part collections of these types. GeoJSON features are not limited to representing entities of the physical world only; mobile routing and navigation apps, for example, might describe their service coverage using GeoJSON. The GeoJSON format differs from other geographic information system standards in that it was written and is maintained not by a formal standards organization, but by an Internet working group of developers. A notable offspring of GeoJSON is TopoJSON, an extension of GeoJSON that encodes geospatial topology and that typically provides smaller file sizes. History The GeoJSON format working group and discussion were b ...
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Keyhole Markup Language
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole, Inc, which was acquired by Google in 2004. KML became an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008. Google Earth was the first program able to view and graphically edit KML files, but KML support is now available in many GIS software applications, such as Marble, QGIS, and ArcGIS. Structure The KML file specifies a set of features (place marks, images, polygons, 3D models, textual descriptions, etc.) that can be displayed on maps in geospatial software implementing the KML encoding. Every place has a longitude and a latitude. Other data can make a view more specific, such as tilt, heading, or altitude, which together define a "camera view" along with a timestamp or t ...
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Spatial Database
A spatial database is a general-purpose database (usually a relational database) that has been enhanced to include spatial data that represents objects defined in a geometric space, along with tools for querying and analyzing such data. Most spatial databases allow the representation of simple geometric objects such as points, lines and polygons. Some spatial databases handle more complex structures such as 3D objects, topological coverages, linear networks, and triangulated irregular networks (TINs). While typical databases have developed to manage various numeric and character types of data, such databases require additional functionality to process spatial data types efficiently, and developers have often added ''geometry'' or ''feature'' data types. Geographic database (or geodatabase) is a georeferenced spatial database, used for storing and manipulating geographic data (or geodata, i.e., data associated with a location on Earth), especially in geographic infor ...
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GDAL
The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is a computer software library for reading and writing raster and vector geospatial data formats (e.g. shapefile), and is released under the permissive X/MIT style free software license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It may also be built with a variety of useful command line interface utilities for data translation and processing. Projections and transformations are supported by the PROJ library. The related ''OGR'' library (OGR Simple Features Library), which is part of the GDAL source tree, provides a similar ability for simple features vector graphics data. GDAL was developed mainly by Frank Warmerdam until the release of version 1.3.2, when maintenance was officially transferred to the GDAL/OGR Project Management Committee under the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. GDAL/OGR is considered a major free ...
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Library (computer Science)
In computing, a library is a collection of resources that can be leveraged during software development to implement a computer program. Commonly, a library consists of executable code such as compiled functions and classes, or a library can be a collection of source code. A resource library may contain data such as images and text. A library can be used by multiple, independent consumers (programs and other libraries). This differs from resources defined in a program which can usually only be used by that program. When a consumer uses a library resource, it gains the value of the library without having to implement it itself. Libraries encourage software reuse in a modular fashion. Libraries can use other libraries resulting in a hierarchy of libraries in a program. When writing code that uses a library, a programmer only needs to know how to use it not its internal details. For example, a program could use a library that abstracts a complicated system call so that the ...
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Free And Open-source Software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term encompassing free software and open-source software. The rights guaranteed by FOSS originate from the "Four Essential Freedoms" of '' The Free Software Definition'' and the criteria of '' The Open Source Definition''. All FOSS can have publicly available source code, but not all source-available software is FOSS. FOSS is the opposite of proprietary software, which is licensed restrictively or has undisclosed source code. The historical precursor to FOSS was the hobbyist and academic public domain software ecosystem of the 1960s to 1980s. Free and open-source operating systems such as Linux distributions and descendants of BSD are widely used, powering millions of servers, desktops, smartphones, and other devices. Free-software licenses and open-so ...
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Shapefile
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. 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''. Overview The shapefile format is a digital vector storage format for storing geographic 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 geometry as primitive geometric shapes like points, lines, and poly ...
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