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 -
- 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.
- 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