TIGER Dataset

The TIGER dataset is extensively used in our GIS visualization work. Best of all, it is freely available. Here we provide some information, tools and auxilliary data sets which we have developed in working with TIGER data. We would be happy to hear your comments or contributions to this collection.

• TMS Server from the US Census Bureau. Illustrates the kind of information that you can extract from the TIGER dataset.
• GIS FAQs from the Census Bureau.
• Ken's Notes on the TIGER file format, plus some links.
• Zilin's html-based download:
  Just by a click, you can download the data for a single county. Best for downloading a small number of counties.
• Ken's download tool:
  Fastest way to download all the data for one or more states.
• Yunyue's boundary tools:
  For extracting and viewing the county boundaries for a state - without having to download the entire data first! Also, a simple drawing to visualize the boundary.
• Grouping and Merging of TIGER Counties
• Location of US Cities, in Latitude and Longitude degrees and minutes. To get a list from the Census Bureau, go to ftp.census.gov/pub/tiger/pts/geoex.dbf for a self-extracting file with 51 dbf files (one for each state and DC). Excell can read dbf files. See www.klaban.torun.pl/prog/pg2xbase/ for utilities to convert between DBF and postgres tables.
• Anomalies in Tiger Data: useful facts to know when handling Tiger data
• Information on computing distances, etc in a faqs list.