The goal of this project is to produce a program that will read in some geographic/topographic information and will then display a map to the screen. One motivation for this project is understanding how to work with the TIGER data format. This is a preliminary step towards constructing a GIS-on-the-web system.
The input information will contain descriptions of geographic features such as small roads, highways, railroads, etc. Your program should display these different features in a meaningful way. For example, you might display the small roads with a thin red line, the highways with a thick red line, and the railroads with a crossed black line. Whatever you think is appropriate.
The input to your program will be data in the TIGER format, which is used by the U.S. Census Bureau. A quick introduction to TIGER can be found HERE . This document gives a thorough description of the first two record types in TIGER, which are the ones you will be using. More extensive documentation is HERE . The entire TIGER data set contains more information than you will need; you only need the first two record types. And you won't even need all the information in the first record type.
You can find some sample TIGER data sets locally, in /usr/unsupported/installers/been/tiger.
The user of your program should have the ability to zoom it, zoom out, and pan around.
Thanks to Ken Been for specifying this project!