[Mapserver-users] Using TIGER files

[woodbri at swoodbridge.com]

The TIGER/Line files by themselves are not useful for creating a map. 
You would be better off getting some shapefiles. Also MySQL is not 
really supported for doing JOINs with shapefiles. I think your 
options are:

1) extract the demographics data into DBF files that you can join 
with the shapefiles - this means you have to have a common attribute 
in both the shapefile DBFs and demographics DBFs to do the JOIN on.

2) load all the shapefiles into PostgreSQL and load the demographics 
into it also.

You also should work out a trivial test case so you know what the 
requirements of all the pieces are before you try and do this with 
TONS of data only to find out that it doesn't work the way you 
thought it would :-/

Can anyone speak to which versions of mapserver support JOINs? I 
think you have to be on either MS-3.3 or MS-4.0 to get JOINS to work, 
but I'm not sure.

-Steve

On 17 Jul 2003 at 14:14, Attri, Abhishek wrote:

> First of all thanks to all of you for such useful and encouraging
> replies.
>   Ok, I have already finished the report generation part for
>   demographic
> data (SF1 and SF3) using MySQL database and PHP. Now I have to add
> mapping functionality. Can I create a MySQL database from TIGER\Line
> files or they can only be used with dbase or PostgreSQL?
>   Secondly, is the demographic data and TIGER\Line Files are enough to
> create the mapping or I need any shape files along with that. I am
> getting on to what you pointed out Steve and therefore would like to
> clear this little confusion before doing it. With thanks Abhishek
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jeff Hoffmann [mailto:jeff at propertykey.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2003 8:17 AM
> To: woodbri at swoodbridge.com
> Cc: Attri, Abhishek; mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
> Subject: Re: [Mapserver-users] Using TIGER files
> 
> woodbri at swoodbridge.com wrote:
> > Attri,
> > 
> > The Tiger/line files are useful for generating the base map and
> > extracting the polygons that relate back to the Census statistical
> > data. You will have to get the statistical data and relate that to
> > the polygons probably using JOIN to relate the polygon to the stats
> > and then use LAYER CLASSes to apply graphical (color/style/etc)
> > attributes to the polygons.
> > 
> > This implies that you can find the statistical data on the Census
> > website and load it into DBF files or Postgres so you can join it
> > with your polygon layer(s).
> 
> That's a great message.  The only other thing that I can add is that I
> have table layouts for both the SF1 and SF3 extracts that can be used
> to
> 
> import that data into PostgreSQL.  You can find them at
> ftp://ftp.propertykey.com/pub/downloads/misc
> They're called sf1.tar.gz & sf3.tar.gz and should work with the data
> that you can download from the Census web site -- I don't recall the
> specific location off the top of my head, but it shouldn't be hard to
> find.  Basically, the tables from there get linked to the census
> blocks information from the TIGER through a geo file.  There's no
> documentation
> 
> in my downloads, but it should be pretty straightforward.  All of the
> .sql files create the tables and import the data.  There's one little
> perl script that converts the geo file from fixed-length to
> tab-delimited so it can be imported, but all of the rest of the data
> files can be imported as is -- if I recall correctly they were comma
> delimited, which works fine for PostgreSQL.  As mentioned earlier, we
> used TIGER2SHP to convert the TIGER files to shape files to get the
> census block shape files for use with MapServer -- it's a nice little
> utility & i think is well worth the price.
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Jeff Hoffmann
> PropertyKey.com
> 
> 
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