GIS Vector Data Formats Greg Yetman CIESIN – SEDAC

GIS Vector Data Used Internally – Shapefile (ingest) – Esri Geodatabase Enterprise and File – PostGIS RDBM – GeoJSON from GeoServer and custom applications Distribution – Shapefile – WFS/GML (as services) – GeoJSON (as services) – CSV (points only)

Issues Shapefile – Corruption – Single-user only – Simple features only Geodatabase – Overhead with maintenance – Esri users only (mostly) PostGIS – None yet (simple use cases) GML – Client implementation issues limit interoperability – Limited community adoption GeoJSON – Simple features required for interoperability – Generally only a web-tier solution Non-geometry formats requested by some users