On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 2:21 PM, Darrell Fuhriman <darr...@garnix.org> wrote:
TIGER is much older than reasonably portable GPS units. According to [1] pre-TIGER paper map sources were below the quality of the 1:100,000 DLG data outside of urban areas. Many of the crazy spaghetti data areas we see probably haven't changed geometry in TIGER much since since the mid-1980's when they were digitized the first time. They were never intended for mapping, but rather were "attribute rich" for relative geocoding. We shouldn't be surprised they as bad as they are. Many of the processes for rural counties to contribute modern geometry (not attributes) to TIGER only gained steam after the date that OSM sucked it it's first big import, so the bad areas never benefitted from the geometry improvements. It is what it is... All this is to say is that it's important to understand the origins of any data - many of the complaints people have about government data sources are easily explained if you trace the origins. For example many people don't know that the original source of the digital spatial coordinates of uncorrected GNIS point data was the centroid of the cartographic labels on 24k topo quads. This entirely explains why the points are most often next to, rather on top of the feature being labeled. Yet complaints abound because for OSM scales, the data is imperfect. So it goes. [1] http://geospatial-solutions.com/tiger-database-historical-perspective/
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