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Census Bureau outlines public geospatial products and mapping tools
Summary
Census geographers gave a detailed tour of public geographic products — TigerLine/TIGER formats, cartographic boundary files, GRF reference files, relationship files — and demonstrated web viewers and the Census Geocoder, with presenters promising follow-ups on data-file availability.
Kevin Holly, assistant division chief for geospatial products in the Geography Division at the U.S. Census Bureau, and Suzanne McCardell, chief of the Enterprise Geospatial Services Branch, gave a roughly 30‑minute presentation on the Bureau's public geospatial products and web mapping tools.
Holly summarized the product categories available from the Geography Program website — mapping files, reference maps and reference files — and described common uses and download options. "We have TigerLine files available in 3 formats, shapefiles, geodatabases and GeoPackages," he said, noting an ongoing effort "to expand the attributes that are in the geodatabases and GeoPackages in the future so that they match the attributes that are in the shapefiles." Suzanne McCardell demonstrated map suites and interactive viewers that allow non‑GIS users to explore the same data.
The presentation covered several catalog products and services: TigerLine spatial extracts derived from the TIGER database, cartographic boundary files optimized for small‑scale thematic maps, geographic reference files (GRFC/GRFN), gazetteer products and county adjacency files, relationship files that map geographies across vintages or types, and address‑related products constrained by Title 13. Kevin Holly described the Census Geocoder API and interactive geocoding interface, and said the Bureau currently handles "approximately 15,000,000 geocoding submissions daily."
Presenters answered multiple audience questions about suitable use cases for cartographic versus TigerLine files, metric units in area/length fields, whether slivers are removed in relationship files, and how GEOID FQ encodes variant/vintage information. On several points the presenters committed to follow up with written clarifications or possible data releases (for example, considering whether to publish housing‑unit‑change tables). The session moved to a break and the moderators noted a longer Q&A would continue at a later forum.
The forum emphasized the distinction between product types (generalized cartographic files for faster rendering versus full‑detail TigerLine for analysis), the Census Bureau's efforts to make map products more accessible via web viewers, and ongoing updates to support decennial and post‑decennial workflows.
