[Xastir] TIGER/Line files --- End of an Era

[Tom Russo]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 07:15:35AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2007, Tom Russo wrote:
> 
> > I just surfed over to the Census web site and see this:
> >
> > http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/future/future_tl.html
> >
> > It says that after the 2006 Second Edition files are released (which happened
> > a few weeks ago), they will no longer be producing TIGER/Line files, they'll be
> > replaced by a number of different file formats including shapefiles.  Looks
> > like a big win for xastir users!
> 
> I for one will be _more_ than happy to see that file format bite the
> dust!
> 
> It wasn't even really a map format:  It was really just several
> database tables dumped to disk files in text format.  A real pain to
> construct anything out of.

But as a true topological format, it did carry around lots of relationships
between data that get thrown away very quickly when digested to formats like
shapefiles.  Made it pretty well suited to GIS analysis, which was its purpose.

-- 
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