Overview
The Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER)/Line® Reader module provides FME with access to data in the TIGER/Line format distributed by the U.S. Census Bureau.
TIGER/Line files are a digital database of geographic features, such as roads, railroads, rivers, lakes, political boundaries, census statistical boundaries, etc., that cover the entire United States. The database contains information about these features such as their location in latitude and longitude, the name, the type of feature, address ranges for most streets, the geographic relationship to other features, and other related information.
TIGER/Line files are the public product created from the Census Bureau's TIGER database of geographic formation. TIGER was developed at the Census Bureau to support the mapping and related geographic activities required by the decennial census and sample survey programs.
Note that the TIGER/Line product does not include census demographic statistics. Those are sold by the Census Bureau in a separate format not directly supported by FME, but those statistics do relate back to census blocks in TIGER/Line files.
Note: To use the TIGER/Line writer, you will have to create a custom mapping file. TIGER/Line writing is not supported in Workbench.
More information on the TIGER/Line file format and data product can be found on the U.S. Census web page at:
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/
This website contains a detailed description of the current TIGER/Line format, with an explanation of field meaning for each feature type.