Friday, December 27, 2013

Municipal area transfer in Rayong

On Monday, the change of the boundaries of two adjoining municipalities in Rayong province was announced in the Royal Gazette. Choeng Noen (เทศบาลตำบลเชิงเนิน), located north and east of Rayong city [Gazette] and Noen Phra (เทศบาลตำบลเนินพระ), located west of Rayong city [Gazette] are connected by a narrow area running parallel north of Sukhumvit road. I wasn't able to find a map of the original municipality boundaries, but it is possible to get them by the Tambon. Both municipalities were originally TAOs covering the same-named Tambon, except those area which are covered by Rayong city, and in 1998 the boundaries of the Tambon in Mueang Rayong district were officially defined [Gazette]. Though the boundaries are only defined in written text and not as a map, by comparing the coordinates it seems that in fact the two Tambon have no adjoining area, being separated by the city of Rayong. Thus the with the announcements now, Choeng Noen gained some area west of Rayong city, with a very narrow connection of the newly gained area north of Rayong city.

The interesting question is whether this change for the municipal boundaries will also cause an adjustment of the subdistrict boundaries, to keep the two municipalities within their original Tambon.

I have tried to turn the main part of the two maps within the announcements into a single Google map, the pink boundary is the area which I believe was added to Choen Noen.

View Choeng Noen, Noen Phra in a larger map

Friday, December 20, 2013

Busy times

To my shame I have neglected the blog in the last month, mostly because I was very busy with working through issues which not directly could be made into a blog post.

One big task has reached another milestone - I finally finished to add the election dates in 2004 which I could deduce from a PDF by the Election Commission listing the term ends of 2008. I now have little over 19,000 council elections in the XML, and a somewhat smaller number of mayor elections since I only added them if I have the name of the mayor, or the term differs from the council term. But sadly the elections aren't done completely yet, this year had another 3,500 local elections. Though there is no concise collective result, at least a good part could be found on the various pages of the province branches of the Election Commission. I am still working on adding those, so more on that in a separate blog posting.

The other task started with my "discovery" of Wikidata. I have now worked through all the Wikipedia articles on the administrative subdivisions and added the ID at Wikidata to all the corresponding entries in my XML. This included several merges of Wikidata entries, where two language editions of Wikipedia had an article but those were not joined yet. Also, some had to be split, the good old confusion between district or subdistrict and the local governments (cities, towns). Now there are 2362 Wikidata items, almost all correspond to at least one Wikipedia article. The next steps are now the programming of a bot to fill these items with statements - I have started and succeeded with a few test edits, but the library to access Wikidata with C# needs a lot of rework before it becomes really usable - so another work to do. At least I have to do some programming, not just XML editing... I detailed analysis of the Wikipedia article I found during this inventory will be posted later, and of course will keep you updated once the TambonBot starts operating.
I wish all my readers a happy Christmas and a good new year, hope I can return to the more regular posting after the holidays.