Company
Date Published
Author
CARTO Contributors
Word count
674
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

CARTO is announcing the availability of shoreline clipped versions of U.S. Census TIGER boundaries, which were previously difficult to obtain due to their complex shape and resolution issues. The new dataset has been processed using PostGIS, a powerful tool that allows for efficient transformations in SQL. By clipping water shapes out of the original boundaries, CARTO has created a valuable resource for mapmakers who want to easily work with shoreline-based data. This improvement is particularly useful for creating accurate maps at high zoom levels, and it's now available as part of the Data Observatory rollout. The use of AREAWATER shapes from TIGER also allows for the resulting dataset to be licensed under an extremely liberal license, making it accessible to a wider range of users.