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Standard of encoding
A GIS file format is a standard for encoding geographical information into a computer file, as a specialized type of file format for use in geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial applications. Since the 1970s, dozens of formats have been created based on various data models for various purposes. They have been created by government mapping agencies (such as the USGS or National Geospatial Intelligence Agency), GIS software vendors, standards bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium, informal user communities, and even individual developers.

The first GIS installations of the 1960s, such as the Canada Geographic Information System were based on bespoke software and stored data in bespoke file structures designed for the needs of the particular project. As more of these appeared, they could be compared to find best practices and common structures. When general purpose GIS software was developed in the 1970s and early 1980s, including programs from academic labs such as the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, government agencies (e. g., the Map Overlay and Statistical System (MOSS) developed by the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management), and new GIS software companies such as Esri and Intergraph, each program was built around its own proprietary (and often secret) file format. Since each GIS installation was effectively isolated from all others, interchange between them was not a major consideration. By the early 1990s, the proliferation of GIS worldwide and an increasing need for sharing data, soon accelerated by the emergence of the World Wide Web and spatial data infrastructures, led to the need for interoperable data and standard formats. An early attempt at standardization was the U. S. Spatial Data Transfer Standard, released in 1994 and designed to encode the wide variety of federal government data. Although this particular format failed to garner widespread support, it led to other standardization efforts, especially the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which has developed or adopted several vendor neutral standards, some of which have been adopted by the International Standards Organization (ISO). Another development in the 1990s was the public release of proprietary file formats by GIS software vendors, enabling them to be used by other software. The most notable example of this was the publication of the Esri Shapefile format, which by the late 1990s had become the most popular de facto standard for data sharing by the entire geospatial industry. When proprietary formats were not shared (for example, the ESRI ARC/INFO coverage), software developers frequently reverse engineered them to enable import and export in other software, further facilitating data exchange. One result of this was the emergence of free and open source software libraries, such as the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL), which have greatly facilitated the integration of spatial data in any format into a variety of software. During the 2000s, the need for specialized spatial files was reduced somewhat by the emergence of spatial databases, which incorporated spatial data into general purpose relational databases. However, new file formats have continued to appear, especially with the proliferation of web mapping; formats such as the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) and GeoJSON can be more easily integrated into web development languages than traditional GIS files.

Over a hundred distinct formats have been created for the storage of spatial data, of which 20 30 are currently in common usage for different purposes. These can be distinguished in a number of ways:
Open formats are developed collectively by a community and are available for anyone to implement and contribute improvements, while Proprietary formats have been developed by a software company for use only in their own software and are generally maintained as a trade secret (although they are often reverse engineered by others). A third category between these would include formats that are owned exclusively by one company or organization, but are published and available for implementation by anyone, such as the Esri Shapefile.

Like any digital image, raster GIS data is based on a regular tessellation of space into a rectangular grid of rows and columns of cells (also known as pixels), with each cell having a measured value stored. The major difference from a photograph is that the grid is registered to geographic space rather than a field of view. The resolution of the raster data set is its cell width in ground units. Because a grid is a sample of a continuous space, raster data is most commonly used to represent geographic fields, in which a property varies continuously or discretely over space. Common examples include remote sensing imagery, terrain/elevation, population density, weather and climate, soil properties, and many others. Raster data can be images with each pixel (or cell) containing a color value. The value recorded for each cell may be of any level of measurement, including a discrete qualitative value, such as land use type, or a continuous quantitative value, such as temperature, or a null value if no data is available. While a raster cell stores a single value, it can be extended by using raster bands to represent RGB (red, green, blue) colors, colormaps (a mapping between a thematic code and RGB value), or an extended attribute table with one row for each unique cell value. It can also be used to represent discrete Geographic features, but usually only in exigent circumstances. Raster data is stored in various formats; from a standard file based structure of TIFF, JPEG, etc. to binary large object (BLOB) data stored directly in a relational database management system (RDBMS) similar to other vector based feature classes. Database storage, when properly indexed, typically allows for quicker retrieval of the raster data but can require storage of millions of significantly sized records.