[mapserver-users] Strategy for dealing with Census Data?

[imap at chesapeake.net]

Stephen,

Oh yeah, we make heavy use of Tiger w/mapserver 
and resell as well, see:

http://imap.chesapeake.net/tigershape99.html

Typically we sell Tiger/Shape with custom implementations
of MapServer which BTW, Is the best (and most powerful)
map engine on the planet ;)   It make sense for customers
which don't want to get into creating their own datasets,
etc.

Tiger is arranged by county, so you have to build
a county level hierarchy of shapefile, with non-unique
layer components, and of course you have to build a 
county leve index for mapserver to deal with.  I have
found it unncessary to index within the county tiles
because the county level layers are relatively small.
Bruce Ralston at http://www.gistool.com sells a good
tool for dealing with Tiger, but you will need to
post-process (manipulate) the data a bit to get it
the way to want it.

Regards,

Chris Stuber (mapsurfer)
Silicon Mapping Solutions, Inc.
(410)257-3187

Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> As a newbie to this list, I am wondering if there is a searchable
> archive that I can check before I post? Where? How?
> 
> Has anyone loaded up the Census data onto MapServer?
> 
> In reading the documentation it appears that layers most be single shp
> fileset - Is this correct?
> 
> If so, that implies that all 50+ state/state equiv. files that the
> Census releases for a given "layer" need to be merged into a single huge
> .shp file - Is this correct? Then I suppose you need to run shptree on
> it. Is there a utility to combine .shp files if that is required?
> 
> Is there a better/other strategy for dealing with this that I have
> missed?
> 
> Thanks for the help,
> 
>   -Stephen Woodbridge
>    http://web-maps.org/