This is a multistep process.

1. Loading TIGER basedata and QA/QC
   • writes the TIGER data to a PostGIS database
2. Loading TIGER polygons and QA/QC
   • builds the simple TIGER polygons and writes them to the PostGIS database
3. Loading TIGER landmarks
   • creates the polygon_landmarks and point_landmarks dataset
4. Loading TIGER water
   • creates the water_polygon, water_line, and water_shoreline datasets
5. Loading TIGER roads
   • creates the TIGER roads and railroads datasets
6. Loading TIGER roads major
   • creates the TIGER Interstate/US Highway/State Highway/Major Roads (including generalizations)
7. Loading TIGER high-level polygon
   • Loading TIGER high-level-polygon name names of states and counties
   • Loading TIGER high-level-polygon county outlines
   • Loading TIGER high-level-polygon state outlines
   • creates the TIGER high level polygon datasets (state polygons, county polygon, zipcode polygons, zipcode+4 polygons, economic polygons, cenus polygons, etc...)
8. Loading TIGER Geocoder
   • setup a simple WFS-R that does TIGER-based geocoding (geocoder.us)

More Info about TIGER The offical TIGER 2005fe manual is attached here. This 350 page .pdf goes into great detail about the TIGER dataset.

Did you know? The TIGER 2005fe dataset contains: count type dataset name 53,235,019 lines completechain 15,941,828 polygons pip,poly2 310,275 area (polygon) landmarks poly_landmarks 264,253 point landmarks (57,070 named) point_landmarks 1,667,674 water polygons water_polygon 7,880,932 (river) lines water_lines 2,593,665 shoreline lines water_shorelines 35,809,110 road lines roads 788,487 railroad lines railroads

Projection We assume that the entire TIGER dataset is in lat/long NAD83. In actual fact, its a bit more complex than that: From the TIGER manual: For the 48 contiguous states, the District of Columbia, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, the coordinates in the 1995 and later versions of the TIGER/Line files are in the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83). For Hawaii and the Pacific Island Areas, the Census Bureau used a variety of sources for building the original digital file in the late 1980s. Neither the specific identities of each of these sources nor their datums were recorded.