Slashgeo

The JAGIS list links to an article on U.S. census data visualization in Google Earth. From the article: "[...] Having the data and a format to hold it wasn't enough. The Census Bureau has meticulously documented its data files—in a 635 page PDF file. To add injury to insult, even after playing with the files for a week, I couldn't find a good way to extract those specifications in a machine-readable format. [...] The final result is a web-accessible, open source GIS package using software accessible to the common public. The only piece of the puzzle that isn't open source is Google Earth itself; regardless, every piece (Perl, Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP, and Google Earth) is available at zero cost." Slashdot also discuss the article. Here's the gCensus project page.

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...