[Xastir] [aprssig] TGR2SHP TIGER/Line translator is now Freeware (fwd)

[Curt Mills]

FYI.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 23:47:12 -0500
From: Ian Millett <n3cva at verizon.net>
Reply-To: TAPR APRS Mailing List <aprssig at lists.tapr.org>
To: aprssig at lists.tapr.org
Subject: [aprssig] TGR2SHP TIGER/Line translator is now Freeware

>From the GIS Tools website www.gistools.com
GIS Tools Software is Now Freeware

GIS Tools, providers of software such as TGR2SHP, TGR2MIF, and Census Summary File translators will now make their software available as freeware. Dr. Bruce Ralston, the author of these programs, states that making these programs available for free is part of his service on the Association of American Geographers Census Committee. In addition to making the executables available, the source code for TGR2SHP is also available along with a technical whitepaper describing the logic and structure of TGR2SHP. States Ralston, "In working with students, and in my own self-education, I have found some of the ideas used in TGR2SHP, particularly efficient extracting of the topology in TIGER and the strategy for quickly assembling area features (polygons to us older folks), to be quite instructive. Students who have been exposed to these ideas seem to have a better understanding of how programs can be structured to exploit topological relationships."
The programs, user manuals, whitepaper, and source code can be found at http://tnatlas.geog.utk.edu/downloadfree.htm. A whitepaper and source code for the summary file extractors will be released before the end of this calendar year.

note: Thanks to Dr. Ralston for releasing his software and source code to freeware.

Ian, N3CVA
Geographer