ShapeFiles
Simpler than Coverages ShapeFiles are a very common format that stores features belonging to a single FeatureClass (see Coverages for now) with no accompanying topology.
ShapeFiles can contain one of the following:
- Points
- Multipoints (point sets)
- Line
- Polygon
Shape files are stored in folders. The constituent files are .shp/.shx files that hold vector data (and presumably the index into that data) and .dbf (DBase) files that hold attributes of the features.