[Aust-NZ] NZ Towns

[Robert Coup]

Hi Peter,

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Peter <webwiz at pl.net> wrote:

> 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.
> GPS coords would also be good but i can get those from google geocoder.
>

Looked at geonames.org? It seems to have most towns with populations (eg.
Pauanui @ 750 people), and names of smaller ones (eg. Awakino).

http://www.geonames.org/advanced-search.html?q=&country=NZ&featureClass=P&continentCode=

There's also  http://world-gazetteer.com which is one of the data sources
for geonames.

<http://www.geonames.org/advanced-search.html?q=&country=NZ&featureClass=P&continentCode=>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
FixMyStreet.org.nz.

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?

HTH,

Rob :)

-- 
Koordinates Ltd.
PO Box 1604, Shortland St, Auckland 1140, New Zealand
Phone +64-9-966 0433 Fax +64-9-969 0045
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