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

[Stephen Lime]

Census data (eg. Tiger) has been successfully used with MapServer. Not as
a single shapefile but rather as a tiled dataset, either by state or by county. You
can certainly run shptree on the tile indexes and on individual tiles if you want
to boost performance further.

Steve

Stephen Lime
Data & Applications Manager

Minnesota DNR
500 Lafayette Road
St. Paul, MN 55155
651-297-2937

>>> Stephen Woodbridge <woodbri at mediaone.net> 10/16/01 08:47AM >>>
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/