Generic Clearance for Geographic Partnership Programs

<Date>

<Name>

<Title>

<Address>

<City, State ZIP Code>

Dear <Name>:

Your government is invited to participate in an initial roll-out of a recently developed tool we are calling Community TIGER. The Community TIGER tool will help support the process of creating, maintaining, and managing the address and geospatial data for your area. It also streamlines the way in which the data are exchanged between you and the U.S. Census Bureau in preparation for the 2020 Census. The tool consists of three parts: web-based address and spatial data exchange functions; a partner toolbox; and a contribution management system. Your community is one of a small set of areas selected for this initial roll-out. The Census Bureau is interested in your feedback on this new tool.

Community TIGER helps governments create an address list where one does not exist, improve existing addresses based on accepted address standards, procedures, and guidelines through testing functions with feedback, and helps governments maintain and manage well established addressing systems. Community TIGER is based on Esri’s Local Government Data Model, so governments familiar with that model should find this approach easy to implement. In addition to addresses, Community TIGER works with spatial data like street centerlines and their attributes allowing partners to submit their street centerlines for evaluation in an online data management system. The data results can be shared with the Census Bureau and other communities.

The web-based address and spatial data exchange functions of the Community TIGER tool allow governments different options for using the tool, such as creating their own data in the web-based cloud, uploading their data at any time, accessing their data on demand, and reviewing, editing, and validating their data through freely accessible functions. The partner toolbox contains a set of user-friendly tools to migrate, standardize, edit, validate, and package data for submission to the Census Bureau. Once packaged, the data are uploaded to the contribution management system where the data are compared to previously submitted addresses and spatial data for your community. The address data are evaluated for compatibility with address requirements and standards for their eventual upload into the Census Bureau’s geographic database. Street centerline data also are compared to TIGER and any differences are noted and displayed. These functions allow users to conduct a quality check of their data as part of the contribution management system, view the results, and offer updates to the Census Bureau for inclusion in their geographic database.

Community TIGER is a collaborative project with Esri. Utilizing cloud technology, the tool provides free access to Esri ArcGIS, with added Community TIGER extensions, and the partner toolbox add-in preinstalled on a virtual desktop. The system is accessible through the Amazon WorkSpace that includes a free thin client download. Once registered, the Census Bureau will provide you with a registration code and login information. An additional benefit is that the Community TIGER partner toolbox add-in is also available for installation on each government’s local environment for those that have ArcGIS with the required extensions.

Please refer to the attached handout, Community TIGER – Partnership Tool for Address and Spatial Data Sharing, for additional information regarding the Community TIGER tool.

A representative from the Census Bureau will contact you soon to provide information on how to register to participate and answer any questions you may have.

If you have any questions regarding participating in the Community TIGER tool, please contact the Community TIGER Team by e-mail at geo.community.tiger@census.gov or phone

(888) 658-5580.

Sincerely,

Timothy F. Trainor

Chief, Geography Division

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