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TIGER Mapping
Service
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TMS is a geographic map service which produces public domain GIF images of map data which is derived from Tiger/Line® data. The primary goal of the service is to provide a public resource for generating high-quality, detailed maps of coverage within the United States and outlying areas, using public geographic data source.
Background information and project history of the service may be referenced in the General Information section of the TMS Home Page. A Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) web page is also available to address specific problems related to the service.
The TMS was designed and implemented by
Chris Stuber (cstuber@census.gov
) to
demonstrate cost efficient delivery of public data and
research and development of the Census Bureau applications on the Internet.
These service were promoted by the Census Bureau Diamond Staff,
Joint Venture projects (Valerie Gregg) with some technical assistance from the
Census Geography Division (Fred Broome, Tim Trainor, Leslie Godwin and
Charles Dingman). Special thanks to Brandon Plewe
who developed the original mapping engine under contract in 1994.
Questions related to the Tiger/Line® data should be addressed to tiger@census.gov and for feedback related to the Tiger Map *Service*, please see the Map Service Feedback page.
The service now uses a TIGER/94® data extract in a binary format, co-developed by Peter Gatusso of the Environmental Protection Agency for use in the Landview II software, Micheal Katz of NOAA for use with his Windows version of MARPLOT 3.0 and in collaboration with the Bureau of the Census and US Dept of Commerce. The binary format reduces the number of TIGER CD-ROMs (currently 44) to 10 compact discs, and is optimized for speed.
This server runs on (2) Silicon Graphics
Indigo2
processors running IRIX 5.3 (tiger.census.gov) each with 200MB of RAM and
9GB SCSI-2 disk drives. The tiger.census.gov is a Domain Name Alias configured
to round robin to the following hosts: tms1.census.gov and tms2.census.gov.
The tools for reading the binary data were translated from the MARPLOT code
with permission. Also, several ideas and algorithms in TigerWWW (but no code)
were taken from the mapreader/mapwriter program by Steve Putz of
Xerox, used in the well-known
Xerox Map Viewer.
The output images are created using a modified
version of the GD 1.1.1
GIF-drawing library by Thomas Boutell and the Quest Protein Database Center, Cold Springs Harbor Labs.
The code for the mapping engine "tigerwww" was written in C,
and was compiled with GNU C version 2.6.3 on Sun Solaris 2.3, SGI Irix 5.3
and Linux 1.2.3. The front-end tools "mapgen" and
"mapbrowse" were written with Perl 4.036.
TIGER Map Service
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