Tiger Mapping and Routing Server

Tiger Mapping and Routing Server (TMRS) is being written in order to facilitate the creation of open source GPS navigation software. Its goal is to simplify street level routing and map drawing functions essential for developing user-friendly interfaces. The data used in this software is available freely from U.S. Census and is called 'Tiger'.

TMRS will be written in C with no platform-specific dependencies. It should work on most operating systems even though the development will be done in Linux. Its design will be dictated by the resource constraints of embedded systems. It strives to achieve low storage and memory requirements.

There are two services that will be provided by TMRS -

  1. Street Routing - in this function, the client provides a start and a destination address. The server computes the best path between the two points and returns driving directions.
  2. Map Server - given a GPS coordinate and area in square miles, the server will return a bitmap that can be used by other applications for a visual display of the area.
In addition to above, a utility program for compressing Tiger Map data will also be created.



Source of Data

The U.S. Census Bureau publishes TIGER data which stands for Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system. The data is divided by county. So, each county consists of a set of data files, each one containing a particular type of data.

TIGER files can be found at the following location:

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/index.html