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

[Walt Lin]

I've got a running version with the census 2000 data.  I convreted the tiger files to shp using tgr2shp.  I extracted layers I wanted for each county into separate shp files.  I then use Postgres to do a query (rtree index) to figure out which shp files I want to turn on for a certain request, and use mapscript to turn them on.  I'm looking into PostGIS but my setup works fine for now.  (I also have my own scale filtering, only selecting the paths to shp files from Postgres if the layer is within the scale, bypassing mapserver's MINSCALE and MAXSCALE).

Good luck.
Cheers,
Walt

ps-- I'm pretty sure that the tiger 2000 files are now freely available in shp format, from somewhere.

On Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 09:47:43AM -0400, 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/
> 
>