Friday, January 21, 2011

Data update for amphoe.com?

When I reported on the reappearance of amphoe.com, I mentioned that it still contains the same data as before, which seems to be rather outdated in some parts. But seems like this will change, as on the commands page of the webpage of the Department of Provincial Administration (DOPA) I found one issued by the Office of Strategic and Promotion of District Administration (สำนักยุทธศาสตร์และส่งเสริมการบริหารราชการอำเภอ) on December 30th, which called the district administrators to send data on their district until end of February.

The attached word document has the data to be submitted, which are almost identical to those fields already shown at amphoe.com currently.
  • Name and level of district
  • Slogan of district
  • History of district
  • Address of district office
  • Area in square kilometer
  • Distance from Province center
  • Location (i.e. neighboring districts)
  • Number of subdistricts, villages and households
  • Number of municipalities and TAO
  • Population
  • Ethnicity of population
  • Major occupations
  • Major products
  • Average income
  • Major festivals
  • Number of schools and universities
  • Number of Buddhist temples, mosques, churches
  • Attractions by season
  • Number of hospitals
  • Number of financial institutions, i.e. banks and pawn shops
  • Phone and fax number of district
  • Name of compiler of the data
  • Map of district
  • Photos of district office, historical photos of district office, landmarks, festivals or anything else important for the district
As I guess the original data compilation of amphoe.com was done in a similar way, the data in amphoe.com is of varying quality - sometimes the history is faulty, sometimes the numbers for area contradict with other sources or the number of villages seems wrong. While for things like history, photos, festivals the local officers are probably the better source, I really wonder why these also should fill the statistical data. Things like the population numbers, area, villages, local administrative entities are all available in DOPA itself already, and using these centrally compiled data would ensure the data is of same quality and reference date. An example of a completely filled questionnaire was posted few days ago, showing the data for Ban Lueam district, Nakhon Ratchasima. It seems that in fact most of is found in the PDF is the same which can already be found at amphoe.com, especially the value for the area of 233 km² (145624 rai) is still the same, even though it contradicts with the value I got from the census 2000 data, and also found in the Muban book from DOPA (Page 184 of Issue 1) - both give the number of 218.875 km².

2 comments:

Ian said...

Have you come across this:
http://criticalasianstudies.org/bcas/back-issues.html

Online and free back issues of Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 1968-2000. Some articles on Thailand and there is an article on Surat Thani in 23.3.

Andy said...

Quite interesting, just could not find the index yet. And the article on the communists in Surat Thani is also very interesting, though I only read the captions so far.

And just today I read that another academic journal on South East Asia has opened their archive, just sad archaeology isn't topic of my blog either.