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U.S.'s 2007 TIGER Data in Shapefile Format
posted by Satri
on Thursday January 24, @11:51PM
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from the all-kind-of-animals-hiding-in-geodata dept.
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The U.S. TIGER dataset has been rarely mentioned here before. The Free GIS D&I Geoblog linked to the announcement from the U.S. Census Bureau that the 2007 First Edition Public TIGER/Line will be available in the shapefiles format. What is TIGER? It stands for "Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing" and from the Wikipedia page: "[...] TIGER/Line is a format used by the United States Census Bureau to describe land attributes such as roads, buildings, rivers, and lakes, as well as areas such as census tracts. TIGER was developed to support and improve the Bureau's process of taking the Decennial Census.
TIGER data can be used by GIS applications and is available without cost due to the requirement for U.S. Government publications to be released into the public domain." Some related stories below. Update: 01/25 04:42 GMT by S : Humm.. apologies, corrected the story, the data is not yet available, the site say "Starting in January 2008, the Census Bureau will begin releasing TIGER spatial data in shapefile format." but it seems it's not available yet...
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Related Stories
OpenSource Map Database 9 comments
[+]
gujju writes "I've been thinking of building an open source GPS-based navigation software for in-vehicle navigation. Unfortunately there are no accurate opensource maps available to use for this purpose. I know TIGER files are freely available but they are hopelessly inaccurate and out-dated. Are there any opensource (freely available) map sources. If not, what are your opinions on starting a Wiki-style opensource map database to build a datasource similar to something that Navteq has?"
PAGC: an OS Postal Address Geocoder is Released 1 comment
[+]
Dan Putler writes "The PAGC project team is pleased to announce the first general public release of the Postal Address Geo-Coder (PAGC). Currently, PAGC is a command line program that takes a postal address database and determines the long/lat of the address in it by using a road network file (in ESRI Shapefile format) that has street address range information (such as US TIGER/Line and Canadian RNF files). PAGC is open source, and is released on the Lesser GNU Public License. You can find out more about PAGC (and obtain the program and documentation on how to use it) by going to the project's web site at http://www.pagcgeo.org/"
Industry: PostGIS 1.3.2 Released
[+]
The PostGIS/Refractions web site announces: "The 1.3.2 release of PostGIS is now available". This release includes bug fixes and some minor feature enhancements, such as improvements in the TIGER geocoder, fix for better OS/X support, fix to WKB parser to do simple validity checks, etc.
Industry: TIGER Support In OpenStreetMap 3 comments
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The Mapping News Blog gives us an update on the TIGER data import into OpenStreetMap. From their blog : "OpenStreetMap (OSM) has completed the bulk import of comprehensive street and highway data for the United States, months ahead of the project's original estimates. The massive data set originated with the US Census Bureau's public domain map database, and importing it required a dedicated upload process running around the clock since August 2007. The imported data will still require human editing and error-correction, but the completed task is a major milestone for the OSM project."
For a very detailed summary as well as example links to the imported dataset, please visit the Mapperz blog link above.
For a very detailed summary as well as example links to the imported dataset, please visit the Mapperz blog link above.
Feature Extraction From Satellite Imagery
[+]
From the GeoNames Blog : "Spot Image, a leading provider of satellite imagery, are making a fantastic offer. Spot Image are teaming up with GeoNames to help improve the availability of free geographical data and offer high resolution 2.5m satellite imagery for automatic feature extraction.
Features that we think can be extracted from 2.5m imagery are city contours, airports, streets, shore lines, lakes, rivers and others. We believe this is a fantastic opportunity for researchers and student-works to find algorithms for feature identification and extraction. Drop me a line for more details if you are doing research in this area and would like to work on this challenging task."
For a better overview and links of importance, please visit the GeoNames Blog.
Features that we think can be extracted from 2.5m imagery are city contours, airports, streets, shore lines, lakes, rivers and others. We believe this is a fantastic opportunity for researchers and student-works to find algorithms for feature identification and extraction. Drop me a line for more details if you are doing research in this area and would like to work on this challenging task."
For a better overview and links of importance, please visit the GeoNames Blog.
New Census Available: USA Counties Data
[+]
The Free GIS Data & Imagery GeoBlog informs us U.S. counties data is now available from the Census bureau. From the blog: "Now users can download directly more than 5,900 data items from the Web site for the United States, the 50 states and the District of Columbia, and all 3,141 counties and county equivalents. Information in USA Counties covers topics such as: age, agriculture, ancestry, banking, building permits, business patterns, crime [...]" The data can be found here.
TIGER Data Finally Out SHP Format
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The Free Geography Tools site brings us news about this data. From their summary : "Over a year ago, I posted about the transition of US Census TIGER vector data from their non-standard format to shapefile format. Despite what you might have read elsewhere, the new TIGER shapefiles hadn’t been released yet … until today. They’ve been saying for months now that they expected to release them in March of 2008, and they made it just under the wire."
To get the link to download the data, please visit the Free Geography Tools site.
To get the link to download the data, please visit the Free Geography Tools site.
U.S.'s 2007 TIGER Data in Shapefile Format
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wtf
(Score:3, Insightful)The data is not available. If you follow the link, you'll see there's a note saying it might be one day, but that's hardly the same as it actually being available.
The original blog you link to doesn't say it's available. Why did you decide to add this extra (and false) info? I mean, I wish it were available as much as the next geek, but at least consider clicking a link before making stuff up.
First time I view slashgeo in 6 months, and again, this uselessness.
Re:wtf
(Score:3)( http://alexandreleroux.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 17, @05:07PM )
"First time I view slashgeo in 6 months, and again, this uselessness."
You must be very unlucky, after 6 months, you replied only a few minutes after the story was published.
Thanks for the correction anyway, even if your last comment is not exactly constructive. That's exactly how the site is supposed to work, having anybody contributing information to make it better. All Slashgeo editors, myself included, are doing it voluntarily. Anyone can submit better stories [slashgeo.org]. We even don't annoy our readers (at least for now? I hope it will be forever like this) with ads.
Re:wtf
(Score:3, Interesting)( http://www.justmeoverhere.org/bookmarkz.html )
"We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream."
Schmendrick the Magician
Re:wtf
(Score:3, Interesting)On that note, if it's not too much trouble, I'd recommend you please try read the story you are linking to if you are going to submit a story - less important for comments - but in my opinion important for actual main submissions.
Don't Hold Your Breath
(Score:4, Informative)The Bureau promptly replied (much to their credit) stating, in part:
Thereafter the website changed to stating "January 2008." How long till it says "February 2008"?
Re:Don't Hold Your Breath
(Score:3, Informative)