[Talk-us] TIGER 2007 files

[mike.onines at juno.com]

I guess the 2007 shapefile release is supposed to incorporate the first of their Accuracy Improvement Project results.  Would be nice to have some sort of automated setup that could incorporate these improvements in streets that are unmodified since the last release, and then could allow a user to compare the new street alignment or data against streets or areas that have changed since the last update.  It would be a shame to be unable to take advantage of the governments ongoing work to improve accuracy and add new information, but the correlation issues seem daunting.
At least we're not in the UK where you already paid for the survey through your taxes, but still have to license the data.
    -Mike

-- "Dylan Semler" <dylan.semler at gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 4:10 PM, mike.onines at juno.com <mike.onines at juno.com> wrote:
Apparently, the US Census folks made an updated data release from their TIGER database on 31 March 2007.

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2007/tgrshp2007.html

Apparently it is in a new data format (shapefiles) than the 2006 and previous releases.  I'm a total newbie to how the OSM project is planning to proceed, so this raised a few questions in my mind...

Is the Census Bureau going to continue to make regular (ie. annual or semi-annual) data releases of street centerline data, or does the 2007 TIGER/Line Shapefile release represent the end of the project?

If they plan on releasing incremental updates, is there an OSM plan in place for pulling from their updated information each time they release? or was the 2006 data intended to be a baseline that would then be improved and maintained only by OSM users?

If the census bureau continues to release updated information, and OSM intends to import the data refinements into the project, how does that work with user edits that have been made between data releases/imports?


I've wondered this too.  It certainly would be nice not to have to duplicate efforts if we don't have too.  I'm also curious about whether or not any of the "MAF/TIGER Accuracy Improvement Project" results have been applied to the 2006 data that we imported.  Perhaps with some of the new shapefile -> osm tools that are being developed one can compare the two data sets for a small area and see if there's much of a difference.

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