[Xastir] Tiger/Line Maps, Future Direction

[Curt, WE7U]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2006, Curt, WE7U wrote:

> Go to the "Map Pointers" link on the Xastir homepage, then to the
> "2003 & 2004 U.S. Tiger/Line streetmap data in Shapefile Format"
> link.  Download what you need.  Go for the 2004 files instead of the
> 2003 ones.  Put them somewhere in our /usr/local/share/xastir/maps/
> heirarchy (feel free to make subdirectories there at will), reindex,
> and Xastir's Map Chooser should then be able to find them.
>
> Speaking of that, anyone care to process some newer Tiger/Line data
> so we can get an updated map set?  It takes a lot of space and
> processor power to process the entire U.S.  I think it was Derrick
> that automated this process and did the conversion a couple of times
> before.  Perhaps he can do it again or help someone else (Gerry?) to
> automate the process.  It'd be great if it could be kicked off on
> TAMU's servers to process it and leave it on the TAMU ftp site.
> Even better if it was so automated we could kick it off whenever a
> new set of Tiger/Line data came out (twice a year now?).

Hmmm.  Looks like we won't have to do this much longer, but we could
still process the 2nd edition 2005 files right now, and the next
couple of sets to come out:

    http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/index.html

But read this:

    http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/future/future_tl.html

Looks like they'll be generating their own Shapefiles soon, plus WFS
and WMS servers!  That should make Gerry happy...   Xastir can use
WMS servers already, but not WFS.

Also, looks like the first 2006 dataset is to be released 4th
quarter this year, so it might be prudent to wait for it before
processing into our Shapefiles.  Unless it's so automated and easy
that we could process the 2005 dataset right away while we're
waiting.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
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