This is the documentation for the NMMAPS update completed in August 2003.

NMMAPS is a collection of tables.  A full list of tables can be found in the tables table.  All the variables you will encounter are defined in the variables table, all the cities in the cities table etc.

Each city in NMMAPS is given a unique two to four character abbreviation, such as la, ny, bost, balt, etc. Throughout the documentation when you encounter a term like *8700, the asterisk should be thought as ranging over the city abbreviations.  A full list of city abbreviations and the full city name to which they correspond can be found in the cities table.  

The city tables are available as delimited text files.  Each city's data is stored separately using the name *8700.csv where again the asterisk stands for the city abbreviation.

All the tables mentioned here (tables, variables, cities, counties, agecat, etc.) are also available for download.  These are stored as pipe (|) delimited text files and are called tables.txt, variables.txt etc.

Making the data available as delimited text files ensures that the data can be read by just about any program you wish to use.