The United States State Boundaries database is a geographic database of state political boundaries. The database includes boundaries for all 50 states plus Puerto Rico, Washington D.C., American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In order for others to use the information in the Census MAF/TIGER database in a geographic information system (GIS) or for other geographic applications, the Census Bureau releases to the public extracts of the database in the form of TIGER/Line Shapefiles. State boundaries with shorelines cut in. The State Boundary with Detailed Shorelines database was created using TIGER/LINE 2011 shapefile data gathered from ESRI's Geography Network. The individual county shapefiles were processed into Arc/Info coverages and then appended together to create complete state coverages. OST-R/BTS Hydrographic data was integrated to create detailed shorelines. The TIGER/Line Files are shapefiles and related database files (.dbf) that are an extract of selected geographic and cartographic information from the U.S. Census Bureau's Master Address File / Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (MAF/TIGER) Database (MTDB). The MTDB represents a seamless national file with no overlaps or gaps between parts, however, each TIGER/Line File is designed to stand alone as an independent data set, or they can be combined to cover the entire nation. States and equivalent entities are the primary governmental divisions of the United States. In addition to the fifty States, the Census Bureau treats the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and each of the Island Areas (American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) as the statistical equivalents of States for the purpose of data presentation.