<div class="gmail_quote">Hi Peter,</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Peter <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:webwiz@pl.net">webwiz@pl.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0.8ex; border-left-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-left-style: solid; padding-left: 1ex; ">
I have blown an inordinate amount of time trying to merge various online sources to get a listing of towns in NZ. Ideally this list would have town , district/city/unitary council, region, and population or area. This would allow me filter by towns above certain sizes for various web app uses.<br>
GPS coords would also be good but i can get those from google geocoder.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Looked at <a href="http://geonames.org">geonames.org</a>? It seems to have most towns with populations (eg. Pauanui @ 750 people), and names of smaller ones (eg. Awakino).</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.geonames.org/advanced-search.html?q=&country=NZ&featureClass=P&continentCode=">http://www.geonames.org/advanced-search.html?q=&country=NZ&featureClass=P&continentCode=</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>There's also <a href="http://world-gazetteer.com/">http://world-gazetteer.com</a> which is one of the data sources for geonames.</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://www.geonames.org/advanced-search.html?q=&country=NZ&featureClass=P&continentCode="></a>Once you've got a latitude & longitude, finding ward/council/region/etc is pretty easy. The Koordinates API is being used for that exact purpose by <a href="http://FixMyStreet.org.nz">FixMyStreet.org.nz</a>.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Getting area or boundaries will be harder. Possibly the Fire Service suburbs dataset (available for $0 but under onerous terms) will help, or look at meshblocks/area-units and their populations from the census database and try and derive from that?</div>
<div><br></div><div>HTH,</div><div><br></div><div>Rob :)</div><div><br></div></div>-- <br>Koordinates Ltd.<br>PO Box 1604, Shortland St, Auckland 1140, New Zealand<br>Phone +64-9-966 0433 Fax +64-9-969 0045<br>Web <a href="http://koordinates.com/">http://koordinates.com/</a><br>