Analogue of TIGER Database In Countries Besides USA

Hi All,

Even if I am biased, I must say that I am impressed with the work that
the USA Census and its partner organizations have done with producing
the TIGER/Line database, especially since it is free.

Not to berate the governments of other countries, but my guess is that
the existence of such databases or the quality and completeness
thereof will drop significantly as per-capita GDP of the country
drops. Is this true?

To what extent have other countries created (free) analogous
databases?

TIA,

Reference: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tiger2006se/tgr2006se.html

-Le Chuad Lapin-

On Mon, 3 Dec 2007 22:42:50 -0800 (PST), Le Chaud Lapin


Basically, scarcely any. Most countries except the USA regard this as
a valuable asset for which they charge handsomely. Census data in
Europe are deliberately aggregated into census tracts to avoid privacy
issues, so census bureaux don't provide anything remotely analogous.;
census tracts are areas and are not road based. The nearest equivalent
are post-code delivery point databases; these are usually value added
products of high quality but also high cost. However you'd need to buy
a separate road database to get the equivalent of TIGER/Line.

The USA model of making data like this available free of charge is
pretty much unique to the USA.

Paul

Hopefully that will change as those countries do whatever they need to
do to make the change. ;)

In meantime, for the rest of us non-geographers, I found this tidbitt
does not contain streets, only names of places (cities, etc.)

Might help for testing mapping products if bogus street data is
injected.

http://geonames.usgs.gov/foreign/index.html

-Le Chaud Lapin-

On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 07:23:41 -0800 (PST), Le Chaud Lapin


It is VERY unlikely to change, for two reasons:

1) A totally different attitude to public data elsewhere than the USA.
b) The MUCH higher quality of the data we are talking about. OS basic
data (which you would need for the street mapping) is on a survey
scale of 1:1250 for urban areas, 1:2500 for rural areas. A product
like TIGER would never be used over here, much less regarded as in any
way definitive.

Paul

The GeoBase data for Canada are actually much higher quality than TIGER and
also free.

But neither of them are good enough for navigation purposes.