GeoSpatial Data Formats

Navigating Spatial Data Structures

Two major types of geospatial data formats dominate the GIS and web mapping industry: Shapefiles and GeoJSON.

The Shapefile (.shp)

Developed by ESRI, the Shapefile is the legacy workhorse of the GIS world. Despite the singular name, a "shapefile" is actually a collection of at least three mandatory files: .shp (geometry), .shx (index), and .dbf (attributes). While incredibly widespread, it has major limitations: column names are restricted to 10 characters, and maximum file sizes are capped at 2GB.

GeoJSON

GeoJSON is the modern standard for web-based mapping. It is an open-standard format designed for representing simple geographical features along with their non-spatial attributes using JSON syntax. Because it is pure text and easily parseable by JavaScript, it is the native language of mapping libraries like Leaflet, Mapbox, and OpenLayers. However, for massive datasets, GeoJSON can become bloated and slow to parse, where binary formats like FlatGeobuf or GeoParquet take over.