Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about MapTechnica.com Tile Sets and Free Tools
What is a "shapefile?"
A shapefile, officially referred to as an ESRI Shapefile, is file format used by GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software. The U.S. Census Bureau uses shape files to visualize various data like U.S. ZIP Codes, County and State borders, congressional districts, and more. We use these shapefiles to generate the tile set overlays designed to be used with custom Google Maps applications and mashups.
Find out more in this Wikipedia article.
What is "TIGER/Line"?
According to Wikipedia, TIGER/Line is...
Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing, or TIGER, or TIGER/Line is a format used by the United States Census Bureau to describe land attributes such as roads, buildings, rivers, and lakes, as well as areas such as census tracts. TIGER was developed to support and improve the Bureau’s process of taking the Decennial Census.
The TIGER files do not contain the census demographic data, but merely the map data. GIS can be used to merge census demographics or other data sources with the TIGER files to create maps and conduct analysis. TIGER data is available without cost due to the requirement for U.S. Government publications to be released into the public domain.
Find out more on the U.S. Census Bureau’s web site or in this Wikipedia article.
What is a "tile set" and a "tile server"?
A tile is simply a square graphic file (PNGs in our case) that, together, make up a tile set.
When you look at a Google Map, you’re actually looking at a bunch of tiles (think The Brady Bunch opening where each Brady head is a tile). Google Maps figures out the boundaries of your map against a vast set of images and serves up only the tiles needed to draw the map you’re looking at.
These tiles are stored and pulled from a tile server. Google has theirs, and you can easily create one for yourself to draw whatever you want over the map.
What scripting languages can be used with MapTechnica's tile sets?
To draw a Google Map, you need to use JavaScript. (But you knew that.) This JavaScript can live on any web page written in any scripting language (or none at all if you don't use dynamic features). The tile set is inherently a set of graphic files, so any web server capable of serving images can be used to use the tile set regardless of the server-side scripting language in which it's written.
Note that the dynamic marker overlays like ZIP Code labels or county names you see on our maps tools are drawn dynamically and require a data-driven site to work. The dynamic examples provided with MapTechnica.com's tile sets are written in PHP for use on a PHP/MySQL server. Each tile sets comes with MySQL, CSV and Excel versions of the data needed to draw these markers, so they can be used for any application.
Languages like ASP, .Net, or Java can certainly be used, but they are not supported in the example files, nor can we answer any questions regarding their use. (Sorry, but we're LAMP developers here.)
