[SDI-Africa] Software for census

[HarshaVardhan]

Hello All,

I have come across this mail in the UCGIS list. Hope it will be useful for
the people in the mailing list. Also I wonder if any one in this group has
worked on similar lines developing customised software's for census.

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-----Original Message-----

I believe the following announcement will be of interest to members of 
UCGIS.

Over the past several years I have written several programs for use with 
Census Data. As part of my service on the AAG's Census Advisory 
Committee, I am making these programs available as freeware. I also am 
releasing the source code for TGR2SHP, the most challenging of programs 
I have written, along with a technical whitepaper that describes logic 
and structure of that program. In working with students, and in my own 
self-education, I have found some of the ideas used in TGR2SHP, 
particularly efficient extracting of the topology in TIGER and the 
strategy for quickly assembling area features (polygons to us older 
folks), to be quite instructive. Students who have been exposed to these 
ideas seem to have a better understanding of how programs can be 
structured to exploit topological relationships.

In addition to the TIGER translators, there are programs for extracting 
tables from Census Summary Files, and one program for creating shapes 
from DLGs. All of these are now freeware.

The programs, user manuals, whitepaper, and source code can be found at 
http://tnatlas.geog.utk.edu/downloadfree.htm. If you find these 
materials useful, and particularly if you use them in an educational 
setting, please send me an email (bralston at utk.edu) indicating that fact.

I will release a whitepaper and source code for the Summary File 
extractors sometime before the end of the year.

-- 
Bruce A. Ralston
Professor of Geography
University of Tennessee
304 Burchfiel Geography Building
Knoxville, TN 37996-0925


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Regards,
Harsha Vardhan