Shapefiles

[talllguy]

GitHub community:

I am proposing an addition to the gitignore for ESRI shapefiles. Shapefiles are a vector based geospatial file format commonly used in geographic information systems software. It is a common way to share spatial data, such as for download from government data portals.

However, shapefiles are only semi-open. Some of the parts are proprietary to ESRI. There are a number of fully open source formats that are much more appropriate for sharing spatial data on GitHub (like geoJSON and topoJSON), that promote data transparency. GitHub has recently added visualizations for geoJSON and topoJSON files.

Ignoring shapefiles in repos allows anyone that wishes to share spatial data on GitHub to ignore these closed files. Users that wish to convert shapefiles to open formats may want to have those shapefiles in the local repo directory, but not shared publicly, because they are not beneficial to GitHub. Adding a default .gitignore for shapefiles may also encourage new GIS users to realize the benefit of using an open standard instead.

Provide a link to the application or project’s homepage
ESRI is located in Redlands, CA, USA. They published a whitepaper on the format in 1998 . There is more specific documentation on ESRI's help site, and on Wikipedia.

Provide links to documentation
Sharing geospatial data on GitHub is a new. There is some discussion of this in the private github-for-government repo. There are posts on the web about the benefits of using geoJSON as opposed to shapefiles.

Explain why you’re making a change
I like the share open spatial data from around the web on GitHub. I also share data on behalf of my organization. Sharing data can require having many shapefiles in a directory for conversion. Rather than deleting them before committing, it would be to everyone's benefit if they were simply ignored.

Please consider the scope of your change
The scope of this change is fairly narrow. People don't have to use it, and if they do, they would want the files to be ignored. It only affects one type of file, not all GIS software.

Please only modify one template per pull request
Done. There are 4 commits because I realized the filename should be TitleCase.

[PhillyCDO]

Our goal in pushing geospatial data to GitHub is to encourage as much external use of this data (i.e., outside of municipal government) as posible. In pursuit of this goal, we provide our data in as many different formats as possible - CSV, JSON, GeoJSON, KML, topoJSON. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to pick up our data and start to work with it.

To this end, we also provide our data in shapefile format in our public repos (both compressed and uncompressed versions). Your points about the "open" nature of the shapefile format are valid ones, but we feel that our ultimate goal of improving usability is enhanced by including as many formats as possible in our public repos. Besides, sites like CartoDB - and others - can consume shapefiles just fine.

I don't see the drawback to including shapefiles in public repos on GitHub.

[talllguy]

@PhillyCDO Thank you for the comments! It is good to read about how others are using GitHub to distribute data, and I do appreciate your perspective.

In the scope of this proposal, I mean only to propose that a shapefile .gitignore be added to the list of templates. I certainly do not want to discourage the sharing of any data, nor would I like to see the shapefile format banned. Since it is a widely used format, I see your point that it is best to share data in a variety of formats.

My hope for this proposal was that users that are taking shp, converting to geojson, and sharing; would have an option to ignore the shapefiles in the repo from the start.

[aroben]

Thanks for submitting this, and for the thorough explanation and references!

I don't think the new .gitignore file really fits in this repository. The purpose of the rules in this repository is to help developers commit the source code and assets that are used to build their software, while omitting build artifacts, IDE settings, etc., that are created incidentally while developing that software. Shapefiles seem essentially equivalent to source code or assets like images, even if the format is distasteful in some ways.

I also think there are much more effective ways to advocate for the use of open formats. Blog posts, emails, reaching out to people directly, etc., will probably have a much larger effect.

Thanks again, and I hope you keep contributing!