[gdal-dev] shapefile enhancements

[Even Rouault]

Le mercredi 30 avril 2014 22:02:34, Jan Heckman a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> Extending shapefile capabilities: The one reason which might persuade
> anyone is the still abundant use of shapefiles for dataexchange.
> Shapefile does seem to play a vital role there. I don't know of anything
> equally 'tradeable'.
> However, an extension would also endanger the
> interoperability/dataexchange, so little of this would work short of
> definining a new shapefile variant specification, working title .shp2.
> I can see the outlines, even though I doubt it will be possible to
> introduce such a thing. The mods would not be that hard, though.

I'm not sure there's a point in defining a .shp2 spec. The GeoPackage one can 
be thought as the "new shapefile".
It should have all its main advantages :
- spatial index
- random access
- binary encoding of geometries

Plus a few nice features :
- attribute indexes
- database format, with SQL capabilities
- binary encoding of attributes
- extensibility

Its history is admitedly a bit young, but the specification is already 
standardized and has begun to be implemented in various software packages, 
including OGR.

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