The "Help" documentation for ESRI's ArcView 3.2 describes a shapefile as "a simple, non-topological format for storing the geometric location and attribute information of geographic features".
In fact, a shapefile is a collection of at least three files which are used to define the geometry and attributes of geographically-referenced features. These files must have specific file extensions and must be stored in the same Windows directory.
NOTE: LegendBurster creates a new field in a project's .dbf file for each query that is run in LegendBurster. It uses this field to store a score reflecting how well the mapObject associated with each .dbf record matches the corresponding query. When a query is deleted from the LegendBurster Query Net Editor, the field corresponding to the query in the .dbf file is removed.
The files that constitute a shapefile are the following:
.shp - the file that stores the feature geometry. Required.
.shx - the file that stores the index of the feature geometry. Required.
.dbf - the dBASE file that stores the attribute information of features. Required.
.sbn and .sbx - the files that store the spatial index of the features. Optional.
These two files can be created in ArcView. See ArcView's on-line help for more information.
.fbn and .fbx - the files that store the spatial index of the features for shapefiles that are read-only. Optional.
These two files can be created in ArcView. See ArcView's on-line help for more information.
.ain and .aih - the files that store the attribute index of the active fields in a table or a theme's attribute table. Optional.
These two files can be created in ArcView. See ArcView's on-line help for more information.
.prj - the file that stores the coordinate system information. Optional.
This file can be created with and is used by the ArcView Projection Utility. It is not used by ArcView GIS Version 3.x or older versions, or by ARC/INFO versions previous to version 8.0.
.xml - metadata for ArcInfo 8.0, for using shapefiles on the Internet. Optional
For detailed information on shapefiles, visit the ESRI website at www.esri.com
For further information about shapefile, including advice on naming recommendations and limitations, go to "Converting a theme to a shapefile" in Appendix 3.
Proceed to "Introducing the MapObject Net Editor"