[Aust-NZ] NZ Towns

[Peter]

Indeed, i eventually concluded that the secondary sources that are freely available are all unreliable. The geographic placename register from linz is two years out of date, and its regions are not TLA regions but land districts. LINZ also has an up to date electoral districts file, which i was able to use to get tla districts from for some 6000 odd places. The geonames dataset is based on the geographic placenames dataset, and has the region field mostly empty. It has partial population fields, ( about a quarter maybe), and approx coords. I found the google geocoder coords to be quite a bit more accurate. I suspect the geonames coords are someones attempts to shift the linz place label coords by half the label width or something.

Anyway the only real solution is as you say is go back to the primary GIS data. Attempts to bodge together old secondary sources only introduces yet more noise into the dataset.

FWIW my excel spreadhsheet is here if its any use to anyone.
http://www.zoneblue.org/files/nz-towns.zip

Which served my immediate purpose, but i do need to get more organised GIS wise.

I have no real fondness for large java or .NET frameworks which are needed for the main GIS packages. As for open source, QGIS would not install, Grass did (brought a bucket load of stuff with it too), so i guess ill try learning it.

Thanks for your help guys.

Peter







Gavin Treadgold wrote:
> On 2010-11-12, at 13:16 , Robert Coup wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 11:12 AM, Peter <webwiz at pl.net
>> <mailto: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.
>>
>> 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?
>
> Much of the boundaries you should be able to get from Statistics New
> Zealands digital boundaries.
>
> <http://www.stats.co.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/geographic-areas/download-digital-boundaries.aspx>
>
> Cheers Gav
>