- Geography 5121 -
Project 6: Geocoding, Topology, and TIGER

Objective:
demonstrate the ability to find, download, and view TIGER/Line File data,
and to geocode an address using specialized GIS data viewing software (ArcExplorer)

Geocoded Address in a Plymouth Neighborhood

The name of the county shown is Hennepin County, located west of Minneapolis in Minnesota.  The geocoded location that is identified on the screen capture is my parents' house.  The neighborhood surrounding this location is a suburban neighborhood with mostly single family homes.  You notice that the location of the geocoded address is very near a cul-de-sac.  The large open space to the east of my neighborhood is a county park called French Regional Park.

"With the assistance of the U.S. Geological Survey, the Census Bureau designed and produced its "Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing" (TIGER) database, which enables the Bureau to automatically match address-referenced attribute data with geographic locations, a process called geocoding." (DiBiase, 2002)

"TIGER/Line files" are feature sets that have been extracted from the TIGER database to produce reference maps for census takers and thematic maps for census data users. The process of transforming address-referenced data to georeferenced data is called geocoding. That's what the "Geographic Encoding and Referencing" in the TIGER acronym refers to." (DiBiase, 2002)