Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Announcements wrongly indexed in Royal Gazette database

While working through the subdistrict creations I have already came across three more cases where an announcement did not match the title it had in the database (a previous one was on a sanitary district). While their title in the database suggested that they are on the creation of a subdistrict, in fact they were on the change (or clarification) of the area and boundaries. Of course, with such a huge database like this one human errors during the indexing are inevitable, I just don't know whom I can notify to get these cases corrected. And I suspect that all those cases where I could not find the announcement (municipalities, TAO, districts) these are in fact simply filed under a wrong title - and maybe I even already have them in my XMLs, but did not look into them and process them since the caption suggests that they are on something of less importance. For example I have done only very few of the subdistrict are changes so far, but there are many hundreds of such announcements.

But now the three cases of wrongly titled announcements I ran across recently.
  • Reassign of Muban in Mueang Satun in 1971, with the important part of the title reading ตั้งและเปลี่ยนแปลงเขตตำบล (create and change area of subdistrict) instead of เปลี่ยนแปลงเขตตำบล (change area of subdistrict).
  • Reassign of Muban in Krabi in 1968, with the same title mistake.
  • Tambon boundary definition of Taling Chan, Chana, Songkhla in 1993. In fact, this one I at first processed as a subdistrict creation, just wondered why it did not list the subdistrict from which the area was taken. Luckily I did not post the statistics for the 1990s before I spotted this. Here, the important part of the title reads ตั้งและกำหนดเขตตำบล instead of การกำหนดเขตตำบล, so also the wrong word for create.
And I have already found one case the other way round. As the geocodes for the subdistricts created since around 1980 are always added at end, I knew there was one subdistrict announcement missing in Cha-Am. So I simply checked the area change announcements for Cha-Am, and there was it - Volume 104, Issue 123 ง, Pages 4520ff. of June 30 1987 is indexed with เปลี่ยนแปลงเขตตำบล (change of subdistrict area), lacking the ตั้งและ (create and), quite similar to the one mentioned in the introduction on sanitary districts.

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