Vector Formats

Personal Geo Database is a Microsoft Access database. The tables are defined by ESRI for holding geo database meta data, and with geometry for features held in a BLOB column in a custom format.

Format Name	Read	Write	Extension	Georeferencing
ESRI Personal GeoDatabase	Yes	No	mdb	Yes

ESRI Shape File:

A shapefile stores nontopological geometry and attribute information for the spatial features in a data set. The geometry for a feature is stored as a shape comprising a set of vector coordinates.

Format Name	Read	Write	Extension	Georeferencing
ESRI ShapeFile	Yes	Yes	Shp	Yes

Limitations:

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Attribute names can only be up to 12 characters long. Longer names will be silently truncated. This may result in non-unique column names, which will definitely cause problems later. Only Integer, Real and String field types are supported. The various list and binary field types cannot be created. The field width and precision are directly used to establish storage size in the .dbf file. This means that strings longer than the field width, or numbers that don't fit into the indicated field format will suffer truncation.

Geography Markup Language (GML)

A file format for the Graphlet system: GML supports attaching arbitrary information to graphs, nodes and edges, and is therefore able to emulate almost every other format.

Format Name	Read	Write	Extension	Georeferencing
GML	Yes	Yes	gml	Yes

Limitations:

Update of existing files is not currently supported. GML 2.0. is supported. XML validation is disabled by default. No coordinate system support.

MapInfo File:

MIF/MID is a transfer standard used by MapInfo, a desktop mapping system. It carries all three types of GIS information: geographic, attribute, and display. Attribute links are implicit in the file format.

Format Name	Read	Write	Extension	Georeferencing
MapInfo File	Yes	Yes	tab, mif	Yes

Limitations:

Only Integer, Real and String field types can be created. The various list and binary field types cannot be created. For String fields, the field width is used to establish storage size in the .dat file. This means that strings longer than the field width will be truncated.

Keyhole Markup Language:

KML is a file format used to display geographic data in an Earth browser, such as Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Maps for mobile. KML uses a tag-based structure with nested elements and attributes and is based on the XML standard.

Format Name	Read	Write	Extension	Georeferencing
Keyhole Markup Language	No	Yes	kml, kmz	No

AutoCAD DXF:

AutoCAD DXF is a file format, developed by Autodesk, in order to facilitate AutoCAD drawings to be opened by other CAD programs.

Format Name	Read	Write	Extension	Georeferencing
AutoCAD DXF	No	Yes	dxf	No

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