TIGER

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Flag of United States Part of WikiProject United States.

U.S. progress animation during the TIGER import (frame images)

The Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system (TIGER) data for US streets, produced by the US Census Bureau, is a public domain data source which has been almost entirely imported into OSM. It provides a great starting point for mapping streets of the United States.

Image:Lightbulb.png Join in with TIGER fixup!

Contents

Tiger 2009

The Tiger 2009 data was released at the beginning of October. Go to the TIGER 2009 wiki page to coordinate coverage.

Status

It is unlikely that the TIGER data will ever be reimported. Enough editing has occurred since the original upload of the TIGER 2005 data (which was not uploaded until 2007) that it will be difficult to determine if differences between future TIGER and OSM are due to good corrections made by OSM editors or they are from bad TIGER data. With the US mapping community is growing strongly now, it isn't as much of a concern. Do not worry about getting your work overwritten by new TIGER data. Go map!

TIGER/Line import is done! (Well, mostly.) See http://www.linux.com/feature/125344. The 50 states have all been imported, and imports for other US territories (American Samoa, etc) are complete.

An initial run took place in 2005, but unfortunately had to be shut off, and data purged, in November 2006 due to data integrity problems. See Old TIGER Import 2005/2006. A second import followed a different philosophy, and began in Sept 2007 using a new Ruby TIGER Parser. Here is a post describing the newest import.

The TIGER fixup page lists things to look for when fixing TIGER data.


Ruby scripts

The follow details were provided back in 2007, and remain here for historical interest, or to help anyone who might want to re-produce TIGER processing work for other map projects. The scripts are no longer needed for any OpenStreetMap work. The import was completed a long time ago.

21 June 2007 - User:DaveHansen provided a summary of the status to the mailing list:

First of all, all of the actual TIGER parsing code here came from Brandon Martin-Anderson. All I did was spit out some OSM objects from the data he produced. He did all of the hard work.

This code takes a set of TIGER shapefiles, and turns them into an OSM .xml file. That file can then be opened in JOSM and reviewed before uploading. If anyone just wants to look at their county, I'll be happy to run this for them and I'll just send you the .osm file. (dave [AT] sr71 [DOT] net)

You can get the code here: http://sr71.net/~dave/osm/tiger/

As of version 0.7, the tiger-to-osm software generates OSM data in the 0.4 format; this data can be converted to API v0.5 using 04to05.pl.

You can get the tiger shapefiles see #Getting TIGER shapefiles

But, don't go uploading anything produced with this [particularly now that the TIGER import has been complete for three years!]

sh tiger-zip-to-osm.sh zips/IL/TGR17019.ZIP

If you use that shell script, it does proper locking, and you can run multiple instances of the converter on a machine without duplicating work (it's SMP safe, effectively).

I feel like it is pretty darn slow. I guess that's mostly ruby's fault, but I'd appreciate any tuning tips that people have for performance tuning ruby. You'll need quite a bit of RAM to run this for any large-size counties. At least a gig, probably two. I put a machine out of memory pretty badly that had 8GB in it because I ran several instances of this at once, and it didn't have and swap.


Fixme: We have a page TIGER to OSM Attribute Map. The script currently follows this? or is that page confusing things?


Debian/Ubuntu Prerequisites

If you're going to run Dave's importer under Debian or Ubuntu, you will need the following packages installed:

  • procmail (provides 'lockfile', the locking program)
  • ruby
    • is it compatible with ruby1.9? if so it will run MUCH faster and be much beter on memory usage, ruby1.9 is WAY faster than ruby1.8 (current default)
  • unzip

Issues with this code:

  • memory consumption can be very large. It is worse on 64-bit machines, and can reach ~3GB for the largest counties in the country
  • it is slower than it could be
  • The shapefiles are very large and can overwhelm JOSM
  • The renderer does not support "unseparated" ways

Who is working on it?

  • Brandon Martin-Anderson - (badhill [AT] gmail [DOT] com) - Initial TIGER parsing code
  • User:DaveHansen - Took a wee bit of ruby code from SVN to start what I have now, but I've replaced almost all of it.
  • Who else?

Various people discussing. Join the mailing list discussions e.g recent mailing list discussion


Getting TIGER map source

Even more outdated: Tiger 2009 data is now avaliable in shape format, and has been cleaned up for much improved in accuracy. Available here.

Outdated: Tiger 2008 data is now avaliable in shape format, and has been cleaned up for much improved in accuracy. Available here.

The TIGER data is not currently available in "shapefile" format -- it's in its own "TIGER" format, so shapefile tools and libraries won't work. (However, the US Census department is phasing out the TIGER format. The new format is described here: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp.html

You can get TIGER zipfiles from here: http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/tiger2006se/

To find your county, look here: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/fips/fips65/data/national.txt

Champaign County, IL has an entry like this in that file:

IL,17,019,Champaign,H1

You can find its zip file here: http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/tiger2006se/IL/TGR17019.ZIP

You could also do something like this if you wanted to get a bunch of counties with the name "Middle" in them"

wget -O - http://www.census.gov/geo/www/fips/fips65/data/national.txt\
      | grep Middle | perl -pe 's#,#/TGR#' | perl -pe 's#,##' \
      | perl -pe 's#,.*#.ZIP#' \
      | awk '{print "http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/tiger2006se/" $1}'      \
      | xargs wget


Census 2000 Geographic Terms and Concepts:

United States
   Region
      Division
        State
          County
            County subdivision
               Place (or part)

http://proximityone.com/tgrcfcc.htm - TIGER/Line File Census Feature Class Codes (CFCC)

TIGER browser and renderings

You can browse the TIGER data through an online interface provided by the census bureau (public domain) at http://tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapbrowse-tbl/

You can also request renderings by passing URL parameters e.g. http://tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapgen/.gif?lat=40.739&lon=-73.99&wid=0.83&iht=300&iwd=300 (instructions)

The open source program RoadMap will render (and allow navigation) with the TIGER data. The data must be pre-compiled to a more compact form beforehand, but pre-compiled map data is available. (http://roadmap.sourceforge.net)

Place Boundaries

The TIGER 2007 data includes place boundaries; User:Lordsutch (as "Chris Lawrence" and "TIGERcnl") uploaded municipal and CDP boundaries to OpenStreetMap for U.S. states and territories.

The following states are incomplete:

  • Florida has a few large CDPs that may be missing their relations.
  • Illinois is 99.9% complete but some edits while the upload was in progress around O'Hare led to deleted ways that made up the boundaries of a few cities and CDPs (most notably, Chicago). I will attempt to repair these areas in the future.
  • Texas' upload was interrupted by the update to API 0.6 in OSM. The way forward to fix this is, as of yet, undecided.

Also, several states were uploaded under API 0.5, which means that some boundaries may exceed current OSM editing limits: AL, AK, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, MS.

The Python scripts used are available at http://www.lordsutch.com/osm/

Addressing Data

The TIGER 2007 data includes address relationship data. Various users are currently working on automated translation of this data into Karlsruhe Schema-style ways that will be associated with the imported TIGER data (and hopefully will figure out a way to cope with merging it with TIGER ways that have been edited by OSM users); the eventual goal here is to be able to geocode addresses within OSM. This will largely rely on the tiger:tlid keys in the existing OSM data.

Links

The main TIGER Website can be found here:

The TIGER data can be found here:

The US Census Bureau Website is:

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