Friday, May 16, 2008

Missing announcements in Royal Gazette database

The Royal Gazette database contains many thousands of announcements, most of which had to inserted into the database manually - just the last few years the announcements were written electronically. It is thus not surprising that some errors occurred during the creation of the database. I have come across a few entries where the announcement title had typing mistakes, which can make it difficult to find a specific announcement using the search interface. One example I had just recently was the rename of the sanitary district Champi to Si That, Udon Thani province, which I could not find at first because instead of สุขาภิบาล it spelled สุขาภบาล - the "i" was missing. Some others seem to have been scanned and stored as PDF, but not indexed in the database, like the creation of the district Fao Rai, Nong Khai province. I could find that one only because the minor districts created in 1995 were all announced together on subsequent pages, but one page was missing in the row. Or for Phrai Bueng district in Sisaket, where the announcement was filed in the same PDF as the page before, and thus not indexed by itself. Another one which escaped me quite long was the creation of Klong Hat in Sa Kaeo - the entry in the database lacked the last part of the title (ตั้งเป็นกิ่งอำเภอคลองหาด), which was the one I was searching for all the time.

As mentioned before I am working on compiling the data of the entities into XMLs, as well as programming some software to help me in compiling data for Wikipedia. For that I have already mirrored around 2000 announcements in PDF format, and severals hundreds I have already processed further, so with my database I can already do things like showing all announcements concerning the administrative entities of a single province.

However in some cases I haven't succeeded to find the announcement in the online database, even though there must have been an announcement. I am listing my problems cases here in the vain hope that someone can help me to get the PDF of the announcement, or at least give the citation of volume, issue, page and publication date. I will probably run into more later, but for districts in the last 30 years these seem to be all I could not find.
  • The creation of Khao Suan Kwang, split from Nam Phong, Khon Kaen province someday in 1978
  • The creation of Plaeng Yao minor district, split off from Bang Khla, Chachoengsao province effective October 16 1978.
  • The rename of Samnak Takhrau district to Thepharak, Nakhon Ratchasima province, not long after its creation in 1995.

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