A shapefile is a widely used geospatial vector data format developed by Esri for storing the locations and attributes of geographic features such as points, lines, and polygons. A complete shapefile dataset consists of several related files, with the mandatory .shp, .shx, and .dbf files storing geometry, spatial indexing, and attribute data, respectively. Due to its broad compatibility with GIS software, the shapefile has become a standard format for exchanging and analyzing spatial data, although it does not support topological relationships between features (Wikipedia).