MAF/TIGER database, like roads and rivers. Relationship files contain additional attribute information users can join to the shapefiles. In this release, both the. The style file I wrote specifies which field in the shapefile to use for the status bar label, and as far as I know, I set that to be correct. Theoretically, the names for the roads should be the same as with the TIGER Census shapefiles, since the OpenStreetMap Project used those files as the starting point for mapping the United States.

The Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system (TIGER) data, produced by the US Census Bureau, is a public domain data source which has many geographic features. The TIGER/Line files are extracts of selected geographic information, including roads, boundaries, and hydrography features. All of the roads were imported into OSM in 2007 and 2008, populating the nearly empty map of the United States.

Status

It is unlikely that the TIGER data ever will be imported again. Enough editing has occurred since the original upload of the TIGER 2005 data (which was not uploaded until 2007) that it will be difficult to determine if differences between future TIGER and OSM are because of good corrections made by OSM editors or from bad TIGER data. With the US mapping community growing strongly now, it isn't as much of a concern. Do not worry about getting your work overwritten by new TIGER data. Go map!

However, TIGER may be useful for analyzing differences with OSM, and for partial import and merging using tools such as JOSM. Please visit the page for the latest release of TIGER data for more information, which is currently TIGER 2016.

Lots of cleanup remains to be done from the initial import. The TIGER fixup page lists things to look for when fixing TIGER data.

History

An import of the 2005 TIGER/Line data was completed in 2007. This was featured in a Linux.com article from January 23, 2008, titled 'OpenStreetMap project completes import of United States TIGER data'.

An initial run took place in 2005, but unfortunately had to be shut off, and data purged, in November 2006 due to data integrity problems. See Old TIGER Import 2005/2006 for more information. A second, successful import followed a different philosophy, and began in September 2007 using a new Ruby-based TIGER conversion script. Here is a post (Wayback Machine) describing this import in more detail. Also see the TIGER 2005 page.

Updates

The Census Bureau releases updated TIGER data annually. Check the following pages for OpenStreetMap notes regarding specific TIGER releases:

• TIGER 2019 - the most recent data

See also

• TIGER to OSM Attribute Map - attribute map used for data prior to 2007, when the switch was made to using MTFCC's instead of CFCC's

External links

• Main TIGER Website
  • TIGER/Line shapefiles (since 2007; 2006 and eariler available in ASCII)
  • TIGER geodatabases (since 2013)

The shapefile is a common standard for representing geospatial vector data. There are several ways of working with Openstreetmap data and shapefiles.

• 2Obtaining shapefiles from OSM data
• 4Working with shapefiles

About Shapefiles

Developed and regulated by Esri as a (mostly) open specification, the shapefile format spatially describes geometries as either 'points', 'polylines', or 'polygons'. In OpenStreetMap terms these can be considered as 'nodes', 'ways' and 'closed ways', respectively. Each geometry has a set of associated attributes. Broadly speaking these are a bit like OSM's tags.

The shapefile is in fact a grouping of several files formatted to represent different aspects of geodata:

• .shp — shape format; the feature geometry itself.
• .shx — shape index format; a positional index of the feature geometry to allow seeking forwards and backwards quickly.
• .dbf — attribute format; columnar attributes for each shape, in dBase IV format.

There are also several optional files in the shapefile format. The most significant of these is the .prj file which describes the coordinate system and projection information used. Although not part of the Esri shapefile standard, the .lyr file is often included as it contains specifications of how to display the data (colour, labelling, etc) in ArcGIS software.

NOTE: Shapefiles have many limitations, like cutting attribute names. This page explains way and shows better alternatives like GeoJSON or vector GeoPackage.

For more info about Shapefiles see Wikipedia

Obtaining shapefiles from OSM data

Download shapefiles

Pre-made shapefile downloads

• download shapefiles created by Geofabrik, updated daily (usually) with a global extract and some countries. Shapefiles with the following are provided: buildings, landuse, natural, places, point, railways, roads and waterways.
• osmdata.openstreetmap.de has shapefiles for coastlines, water polyons, land polygons and icesheets, updated daily.
• osmdata.openstreetmap.de offers coastline and icesheet data. Operated by FOSSGIS, replaces openstreetmapdata.com.
• BBBike.org extract service offers shape files for more than 200 cities and regions worldwide, updated weekly. Separate shapefiles for points, places, waterways, roads, railways, landuse and buildings with relevant tags, then shapefiles with all points, lines and polygons together.

Services generating custom shapefile downloads

• HOT Exports service (export.hotosm.org) (code) - custom export based on tag files (or all tags) in certain developing world regions, with data about an hour old
• BBBike.org extract service offers shapefiles for an area of your choosing, updated weekly. Separate shapefiles for points, places, waterways, roads, railways, landuse and buildings with relevant tags, then shapefiles with all points, lines and polygons together.
• OSMaxx extract service, export to Shapefile (and GeoPackage etc.) based on bounding box for whole world with data about a day old.
• OSM2GIS - Simple tool developed by User:Arnaud974, one shapefile each with all tags for points, lines and polygons
• Boundaries Map offers worldwide shapefiles of all administrative boundaries. Database will be updated at midnight, German time. Created by User:wambacher

Create your own shapefiles

• QGIS (qgis.org) - This desktop GIS software has a QGIS OSM Plugin allowing you to open OSM files and save them to shapefile

  note: OSM-Plugin only loads information from 8 keys and cuts values at 82 chars.

  Blog post on the steps to do it from JOSM

• ArcGIS has a free editor toolbar as well, which creates geodatabases rather than shapefiles (an ArcGIS file format)
• 'Open Street Map layers importations applications' chapter in Orfeo Toolbox Cookbook, Orfeo Toolbox being available in QGIS through the Sextante plugin.
• If you load OSM data into a PostGIS database using osm2pgsql, you can use some PostGIS capable GIS software (e.g. those listed below) or run pgsql2shp (feature of PostGIS) to create a shapefile.
• Osmiumcan write all vector formats OGR supports using its OGRGeometryFactory and the gdalcpp.hpp wrapper around the GDAL/OGR library. There is some sample code in the Osmcode organisation at Github. The 'export' command of Osmium Tool can write the formats OGR supports.
• ogr2ogr - ogr2ogr/GDAL 1.10 or newer has support. Converts OSM data not only to shapefiles but to any vector format which has write support in GDAL/OGR - PostGIS, Oracle, MapInfo, GML, Spatialite etc.
• Spatial Manager is a software suite for converting geospatial datasets. Includes its own OSM data provider.

Obtaining OSM data from shapefiles

Whilst you may want to convert shapefiles into .osm format for some other reason (e.g. to work with OpenStreetMap related tools) such conversion is normally done as part of an import process. See Import/Shapefile for details.

• Merkaartor has support for reading shapefiles.
• JOSM can load shapefiles with its plugin OpenData.
• Potlatch 2 can display shapefiles as background layer (how-to)

Working with shapefiles

Using GIS

Main article:GIS software

There's lots of GIS software which works with shapefiles. Wipeout 2048 intro.

Other tools and tricks