Sharing data with interchange formats

In the early days of geospatial analysis, different software packages had their own proprietary file formats. When analysts needed to share data with people using a different system, they would have to convert it to an interchange format that had an open specification that different software packages could convert into their own proprietary format. Early examples of interchange formats included Esri Shapefiles and the ArcInfo Interchange format, which had the extension E00. The limited number of formats to exchange data and the limitations of those formats, such as limits on file size, made sharing inefficient and inconvenient. The Open GIS Consortium and the open source software community in general worked to create new standards to increase the number of interchange formats using open specifications. The tag-based XML formats described earlier in this chapter, GeoJSON, and the file-based geodatabases including GeoPackage and Esri’s File...