Introducing Geographic Information Systems with ArcGIS: A Workbook Approach to Learning GIS, 3rd Edition

TIGER/Line Files

TIGER/Line files are a product of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. TIGER stands for Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing. (You really should write this identifier in your Fast Facts File, unless your memory is better than mine. I can barely parse it, much less remember it. You have to wonder which came first, the name or the acronym.19) TIGER/Line files primarily contain data related to streets—name, street numbers, census tracks, zip codes, county and state codes, and the geographic coordinates of these features. They were designed as the framework on which to hang the census data, and for the use of census takers. A bit later in this chapter, you will look briefly at TIGER/Line files that represent streets, roads, and highways.

But TIGER/Line files also include other types of data that can be represented in linear form, such as political boundaries, railroads, and streams. Fay_Tiger and Mad_Tiger are feature classes in the feature dataset County_streams, in the personal geodatabase Kentucky_River_Area_Data, in the folder [___]IGIS-Arc\River.

The Fay_Tiger and Mad_Tiger datasets are not TIGER/Line files, per se, but were derived from them.

____ 43. In the T/C, click Layers to select it. Be sure that you are zoomed to the GPS layer and that List By Drawing Order is active at the top of the T/C. Click Add Data and navigate to [___]IGIS-Arc\River. Pounce on it. Pounce on Kentucky_River_Area_Data.mdb. Pounce on County_Streams. Select Fay_Tiger ...