Spaced Out ::

Shapefiles have been in my mind recently, partly due to having to swap data with a researcher in an earth science department. May earth science/geology departments have come to the GIS party quite late it would seem and use a variety of software for mapping, analysis etc. Anyway, a little bit of digging (actually not much at all as I only went to Wikipedia) and I found the Wikipedia entry which really is very good. I nice explanation of the history of shapefiles and the different files that make up the full “package”. There are also some very good links to the open specification, KML converter and other goodies. One of my favourites is Shape Viewer, freeware software for viewing shapefiles, exporting point coordinates and recreating index files (for damaged shapefiles). As a standalone VB project at only 132kb its a handy utility.