Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS55)

DESCRIPTION: Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 55-3 provides codes for named popu lated places, primary county divisions (such as townships and census county divisions), American Indian and Alaska Native areas, and several kinds of facilities. It also provides comparable codes for counties and equivalent legal and statistical entities. In addition to the entity name and its code, the guideline provides other identifying and cross-reference information for each file entry. This guideline covers the 50 States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the outlying areas (American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Virgin Islands of the United States, and United States Minor Outlying Islands) and freely associated areas (the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau) of the United States. For each State, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and outlying areas, the guideline records all incorporated places, census designated places, county subdivisions, counties and statistically equivalent entities and their primary divisions as recognized by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. It also includes all American Indian and Alaska Native areas included in the last census, and a list of many other named populated locations. Among the facilities included are national parks, military installations, Coast Guard bases, and major airports. The guideline provides a class designator, or code, for each entry to distinguish populated places, county subdivisions, counties, American Indian and Alaska Native areas, selected facili ties, and obsolete and unverified names. The class code structure also provides subcategories that distin guish active local governments from those that are inactive or nonfunctioning, various types of populated places and Federally and State recognized American Indian and Alaska Native entities, several types of government facilities, and so forth. FIPS 55-3 supersedes FIPS 55-2 in its entirety and incorporates technical changes that have been issued by the U.S. Geological Survey, Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of the Census, Department of Commerce. Several categories of locational entities have been dropped in FIPS 55-3; these are documented in the text. In addition, the text of FIPS 55-3 contains minor editorial changes and updates from the text of FIPS 55-2.

ORIGINATING AGENCY / PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR(S):  United States Census Bureau

RELATED WEB SITES:   FIPS Home Page
(out of the ITL at the National Institute of Standards and Technology )
USGS FIPS55 Web Page

DATA DISSEMINATED BY:  U.S. Geological Survey (under authority of NIST)