Have you been looking for a way to view all of the Census Bureau’s geographic areas and geographic information?  Do you need spatial data for your applications?

We just released an updated version of TIGERweb — a system to share Census Bureau geographic information online and a useful tool for measuring America’s places.

TIGERweb consists of a viewer application and various web services designed to meet the needs of a variety of data users, from those who just want to view census geography and features, like roads and rivers, to those who want to analyze spatial data and build applications. TIGERweb allows us to share through the Internet our Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing System (TIGER) database with the public.

What is TIGER?

TIGER contains over 30 legal and statistical geographic areas as well as transportation and hydrographic features covering the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The beauty of this system is that users may view and analyze TIGER data with a geographic information system without having to download the data.

How does the TIGERweb viewer work?

The TIGERweb viewer allows users to view and query census geographic areas and features such as roads, railroads, and rivers. It has a variety of uses, such as reviewing legal and statistical area boundaries.  Among a number of attributes available, TIGERweb includes 2010 Census housing and population counts.

You can access the TIGERweb viewer here. In addition, the TIGERweb introductory web page contains general information including 508-compliant data files.

The TIGERweb viewer is not recommended for analyzing data or linking to data. For these tasks, TIGERweb offers two types of web services: the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) standard and Esri’s Representational State Transfer (REST) interface. Both options allow you to access the TIGER data stored in the TIGERweb database.

Users who have a client that supports the WMS standard may access the TIGERweb service by adding the following URL to their WMS client application:
//tigerweb.geo.census.gov/ArcGIS/services/tigerWMS/MapServer/WMSServer.

Users who have a client that supports the REST interface may access the TIGERweb service by adding the following URL to their REST client application: //tigerweb.geo.census.gov/ArcGIS/rest/services.

Currently, only 2010 Census boundaries are available in TIGERweb. However, we plan to include current and ACS boundaries by refreshing TIGERweb with new data twice every year.

For more information, see the tip sheet.