[Xastir] A rant on the shapefiles...

[Curt, WE7U]

On Wed, 9 Apr 2008, Richard Polivka, N6NKO wrote:

> I am wondering who participated in getting these maps made? Was it state,
> county, feds?

Blame the census takers.  Feds.  Federalies.  Men in black?

For the purpose of taking the every-10-year federal census they've
kept track of roads.  Unfortunately the census-takers haven't had
any cartography training (hey, it's really not their job, right?).
The maps were not intended to be used for the purposes people put
them to.  That philosophy is changing a bit lately and they're
trying to do a better job on the data.  I suspect Gerry or Tom can
fill us in on the details, but that's my vague recollection.

Even with that less than stellar cartography start, they're awfully
nice road maps, and free.  Hard to beat that in most other
countries!

Many of the commercial mapping programs start with Tiger data as
their base and add to/correct it.

-- 
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.
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