[Xastir] Tiger 2006 files as shapefiles

[Tom Russo]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 09:50:57PM +0000, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <jronan at tssg.org> flavor, containing:
> 
> 
> So, what needs to be done to generate them?  I hate to see a machine  
> idle. If someone could talk me through the procedure, I could  
> generate them on the machine they are now sitting on.

It's in README.MAPS, right after where it describes how to 
run the ogr2ogr for the linear features, but what's there is pretty sparse.

Each of the original TIGER/Line directories needs to be processed a
second time using the "Xastir-tigerpoly.py" script to make the additional 
polygon shapefiles.  That script requires gdal with python support, and can
be found in the scripts directory of the xastir source code.  I also recommend 
using the "-d" flag to dissolve boundaries between polygons with the same 
name, or things like parks and other major polygon features will generally be 
made up of many small, individually labeled polygons.

When I first mapped out the process for doing the conversions I wrote a
simple script that did the ogr2ogr and the Xastir-tigerpoly.py  for each
of the tiger files for a whole state, and extracted the county name from
the ".MET" file to use as the file name.  I think I still have that script
lying around at work and can provide it here (it's very simple and never 
seemed significant enough to add to the scripts directory, and I was lazy 
and hardcoded some of the title parsing stuff in a way that had to be 
hand-edited for each state).  I think Derrick Brashear did something a little 
more clever with it when he did the 2004 files to be placed on 
xastir.tamu.edu.

> On 19 Feb 2007, at 21:15, Jason Winningham wrote:
> 
> >
> >On Feb 19, 2007, at 3:05 PM, Jason Winningham wrote:
> >
> >> (except for the missing polygons).
> >
> >I should clarify: the polygon data is generated via a different  
> >method, and results in a separate shapelib.  Again, there is  
> >nothing wrong with the shapefiles you generated.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick