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TIGER Support In OpenStreetMap

posted by lxnyce on Monday February 18, @11:15AM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the Getting-better-and-better dept.
Open Source Community GPS Web Mapping
The Mapping News Blog gives us an update on the TIGER data import into OpenStreetMap. From their blog : "OpenStreetMap (OSM) has completed the bulk import of comprehensive street and highway data for the United States, months ahead of the project's original estimates. The massive data set originated with the US Census Bureau's public domain map database, and importing it required a dedicated upload process running around the clock since August 2007. The imported data will still require human editing and error-correction, but the completed task is a major milestone for the OSM project."

For a very detailed summary as well as example links to the imported dataset, please visit the Mapperz blog link above.

Related Stories

Technology: U.S.'s 2007 TIGER Data in Shapefile Format 6 comments [+]
The U.S. TIGER dataset has been rarely mentioned here before. The Free GIS D&I Geoblog linked to the announcement from the U.S. Census Bureau that the 2007 First Edition Public TIGER/Line will be available in the shapefiles format. What is TIGER? It stands for "Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing" and from the Wikipedia page: "[...] TIGER/Line is a format used by the United States Census Bureau to describe land attributes such as roads, buildings, rivers, and lakes, as well as areas such as census tracts. TIGER was developed to support and improve the Bureau's process of taking the Decennial Census. TIGER data can be used by GIS applications and is available without cost due to the requirement for U.S. Government publications to be released into the public domain." Some related stories below. Update: 01/25 04:42 GMT by S : Humm.. apologies, corrected the story, the data is not yet available, the site say "Starting in January 2008, the Census Bureau will begin releasing TIGER spatial data in shapefile format." but it seems it's not available yet...
Application Domains: Census Atlas of the United States [+]
The Map Room introduces the Census Atlas of the United States, fully available free as a PDF. From the press release: "The atlas, with more than 700 full-color maps, is the first general population and housing statistical atlas published by the Census Bureau since 1925. Featuring more than 300 pages and weighing about 7 pounds, the atlas presents data from 1790 through 2000. It is arranged by topic and grouped into three general themes — who we are, where we come from and what we do. Most maps feature county-level detail for the United States and Puerto Rico."
Application Domains: OpenStreetMap Licence and News Wrap-Up 2 comments [+]
Here's a wrap-up of last month's geonews regarding OpenStreetMap. First is a long discussion on the licence attributed to data contributed to the OpenStreetMap project, an exert: "Many of the problems arise because Creative Commons (the “CC” of our licence), as the name suggests, is largely concerned with “creative works” - music, literature, art, and so on. OpenStreetMap, on the other hand, produces data: a factual, uncontroversial recording of the world around us. [...] In the [Science Commons initiative] protocol, Creative Commons restates the problem that copyright simply does not apply universally to factual information." Then there's an update on Nestoria, the first commercial application now using exclusively OSM data. We also have Google's Ed Parsons discussing the differences between data in Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. Other OSM entries include a short discussion on the community surrounding OSM vs "old timers", a mention of OSM during the KDE 4 keynote, a visual comparison of Google data vs OSM + OpenAerialMap data over China, a short account of using JOSM, the advanced OpenStreetMap editor, and finally, the announcement of this year's State of the Map 2008 conference will be held in Ireland. See also the numerous related stories below (more if you search the Slashgeo archives). On a personal note, I used to say about OSM that data is particularly useful in Europe, but not in North America yet... after a quick peak today at the status of OSM completion in NA, I admit I'm impressed, data has been added very rapidly and this is obviously great news for public domain data.
Technology: Open US GPS Data [+]
Slashdot is currently having a discussion about the subject which pretty much gravitated towards Open Street Map. The article may not be that interesting, but as always slashdot user comments are worth reading. From the Slashdot summary : "I read an article today about a map error on the popular Garmin GPS devices which often leads to truckers in a particular town becoming trapped. From my own experience, every electronic map I've ever seen (Google, Mapquest, my Mio GPS) has the layout of my neighborhood completely and frustratingly wrong. A quick search turned up only one open-source mapping project, but it's for New Zealand only. Why are there no comparable projects in the U.S. or elsewhere?"

Head on over to Slashdot to see the always heated discussion.
Application Domains: OpenStreetMap Grants - Money for Free Maps [+]
Nick writes "CloudMade announced details of their OpenStreetMap Grants scheme yesterday. The idea is simple — anyone can apply for grants of £100 — £1000+ to support useful, interesting or innovative work around OpenStreetMap. This could be anything from squashing OSM’s 10 most annoying bugs to mapping an entire city to building an OSM community from scratch to writing a new mapping client. The grants scheme is open to anyone regardless of location — all ideas are considered and the chosen entries will be announced on CloudMade's blog." Recent OSM related stories copied below, but a lot more with a search.
Technology: TIGER Data Finally Out SHP Format 1 comment [+]
The Free Geography Tools site brings us news about this data. From their summary : "Over a year ago, I posted about the transition of US Census TIGER vector data from their non-standard format to shapefile format. Despite what you might have read elsewhere, the new TIGER shapefiles hadn’t been released yet … until today. They’ve been saying for months now that they expected to release them in March of 2008, and they made it just under the wire."

To get the link to download the data, please visit the Free Geography Tools site.
Technology: OpenStreetMap Now Exports Maps and eWorld 2 comments [+]
The Mapping News Blog reports about OpenStreetMap new ability. It already supports a couple of different formats, including PNG, JPEG, PDF, SVG and Postscript. For more info and the screenshots, please visit the Mapping News Blog. Update: 04/22 14:47 GMT by S : Here's the official announcement on the new export capabilities. In addition to lxnyce's story, I recently found out (via Kurt) about eWorld, an open source framework to import mapping data, including OSM data. From the eWorld page: "eWorld is a framework to import mapping data from providers, such as OpenStreetMap.org (OSM), visualize it, edit and enrich it with events or annotational attributes and pass it to traffic simulators, such as SUMO or VanetMobiSim."
Open Street Map in Shapefile Format 2 comments [+]
The Mapperz blog is reporting about this. From their blog : "This is top news for GIS users who support OpenStreetMap, there is no longer any need to convert the osm.bz2 to shapefiles as it is supplied in shape format now."
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