This previous week I worked on loading road data to a database. Since there may be some question, this relates to my thesis in the following ways… Currently the road data is loaded from a CSV file and all of it is loaded at once (i.e. a small part of my local area). So if someone drives out of that area then there is simply no data. Using a database will allow me to dynamically load the road data based on a general location and all of the roads in the US can be stored (offline) and retrieved when needed.
Additionally this will be useful if my next thesis adviser wants me to create something that gives directions from one address to another. Also this will be useful for GeoCoding if that ever comes up.
So I’ve downloaded all of the “edge” files from the Tiger “edge” files from the US Census Bureau and wrote a program to process each one, one by one. Additionally I’ve installed MySQL. This week I may work on creating the appropriate users, tables for loading the data, and actually loading the data (if I get that far).
