Description: TIGER line Census Tract BoundariesFrom the Census Bureau Documentation:What are TIGER/Line Shapefiles?The TIGER/Line Shapefiles are extracts of selected geographic and cartographic information from the U.S. Census Bureau's Master Address File/Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (MAF/TIGER) database. The shapefiles include information for the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. They do not contain any sensitive data, areas used for administering censuses and surveys, or attributes used only in internal processing. The TIGER/Line Shapefiles are designed for use with geographic information system (GIS) software. The MAF/TIGER database contains geographic linear, areal, and point features such as streets, railroads, rivers, lakes, and landmarks (airports, schools, etc.). Geographic entity boundaries from the MAF/TIGER database are represented in the files, as well as the polygons that make up the legal and statistical geographic areas for which the Census Bureau tabulates data. The MAF/TIGER database also contains attribute information about these features, such as names, the type of feature, address ranges for most streets, the geographic relationship to other features, and other related information.Relationship of the TIGER/Line Shapefiles to Census Statistical Data What makes the TIGER/Line Shapefiles particularly valuable in the GIS environment, and to the data user community, is the ability to directly link the geographic areas to data from the 2010 Census, the American Community Survey, the Economic Census, and other survey and population estimates data. The TIGER/Line Shapefiles include Federal Information Processing Series (FIPS) codes and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) codes, where available. Census Bureau codes, or locally produced codes to uniquely identify geographic areas for the nation’s legal and statistical entities also are included for selected geographic areas.TIGER/Line Shapefiles do not include demographic data from surveys and censuses, but the two can be joined by using the geographic entity codes found in both the shapefiles and the demographic data. The inclusion of a set of unique key codes allows for geographic entities to be easily matched and linked with data from censuses and surveys. Data from many of the Census Bureau’s surveys and censuses, including the geographic codes needed to join to the TIGER/Line Shapefiles, can be obtained from American FactFinder (http://factfinder2.census.gov).
Copyright Text: Downloaded from Census Bureau site, 4/4/2011
Bill Winston - Washington University GIS Analyst