An individual geographic element in a GIS dataset, such as a single road segment, building footprint, or point of interest.
A feature is one row in a spatial dataset — the geographic equivalent of a record in a database. Each feature has a geometry (its shape and location) and attributes (descriptive information about it). A dataset of parks contains one feature per park; a dataset of roads contains one feature per road segment.
Features can be points (a fire hydrant, a school), lines (a road, a river), or polygons (a building footprint, a municipal boundary). The geometry type determines what spatial operations are valid for that layer.
Example: In a dataset of fire stations, each fire station is a feature. Its geometry is a point (the station's location), and its attributes include the station number, address, number of trucks, and district. Selecting a feature on the map shows all its attribute information.