[Talk-us] TIGER considered harmful

[Bill Ricker]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 4:29 PM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:
> Used state data instead, if I were to do a mass import.  Oregon GEO
> knows what they're doing, the US Census (along with the rest of the
> federal government) barely acknowledges we exist.  Which would you
> rather trust?

indeed, that's why there are massgis: tags instead of tiger: tags in
Massachusetts.

We get our own parochial weirdnesses as a result, but it's better than
TIGER in so many ways (even re oneway randomness).  I did a little
work on Rhode Island after a recent roadtrip and was reminded how
nasty raw TIGER imports are eg around interchanges. The one area
MassGIS fails us is finer granularity of the non-routable boundaries
off the primary thoroughfares, but it should be scriptably repairable.

Oregon GEO is quite possibly as enlightened about licensing as MassGIS
too -- if their data are better than Tiger and compatibly licensed
with OSM, it's worth importing as replacement for unfixed Tiger or
Tiger that only you have only un-abbreviated.  Hard part is deciding
what to do about the hand edits, either to tiger imports or new where
old tiger had nothing. This is the same as the discussion about
replacing old tiger with new.


-- 
Bill
n1vux at arrl.net bill.n1vux at gmail.com