Geographic coordinates in constituency announcements

So far, in all publication within the Royal Gazette which refer to actual geographic coordinates, these are given in the Military grid reference system (MGRS), omitting the obvious zone identifier at the beginning. Additionally, these are (or at least were) in the Thai Indian reference frame, and not the WGS84 reference frame used by GPS, Google Earth and now also in the maps by the Royal Survey Department like the L7018 1:50.000 maps.

However, in the two latest constituency boundary announcements from the Election Commission, a new system of coordinate references seems to have started. Published on March 3 and approved for publication on February 23, the constituencies for the forthcoming municipal election in Yasothon town (เทศบาลเมืองยโสธร) have been changed [Gazette], modifying the boundaries defined in 2004 [Gazette]. And within this announcement, coordinates given as UTM ๐๔๐๗๖๒๙ ๑๗๔๖๘๓๔. Again omitting the obvious zone 48P, and probably still within the Thai Indian 1975 frame. In fact, MGRS is only a different way of writing down an UTM coordinate, the first two digits of the easting and northing each become a letter. Also notable, the UTM coordinates in this announcement have one digit more in both northing and easting, thus an accuracy of 1 meter instead of 10 meter as used in the MGRS coordinates.

And since it is not that many coordinates, I have done the work again to create a simple map out of them, trying to match the boundaries of the constituencies with the boundaries of the municipality as defined in 1994, when the municipality was created [Gazette].



View Larger Map

Christmas gift for coordinate lovers

When I last mentioned the MGRS coordinates found in several of the Royal Gazette announcements, there was the question on how to convert them into the more easily accessible latitude and longitude values. I had all the necessary source code within my own application, but in order to use it one needs to be a programmer - or at least have Visual Studio installed and be able to compile it. So not really something which a normal computer user could do.

But as its now the time of year for gifts - and Christmas trees show up in Bangkok as well even though their don't belong into the culture there - I have now split the relevant parts of my source code into a separate application which does nothing else but the coordinate transformation. It is still more of a prototype than a good application, but at least it should be easy to use and should enable everyone who is interesting with a way to see in Google Earth what was meant by the MGRS coordinate.

Since I wanted to add some visual sugar as well, there is a map display which directly shows the location. For a start, I used the Beta version of the official Bing maps control, which is still quite limited but was easy enough for a start. Main limitation is that to use it one needs a key, and I doubt I can supply my key with the application. If you have one, it needs to be added into the file "GeoTool.exe.config", which however is well hidden due to the way WPF applications install in Windows. But even without it, the map will display, but with an ugly banner over it.

To avoid that everyone asks for the same enhancements of this tool, here's my main to do list. If you can think of anything else, feel free to comment, though I won't promise anything...

• Easy way to set the maps key, or be able to avoid it altogether
  
• Have an interactive map, so can drag the marker on the map and see the coordinates changing
  
• Have other map providers, Google Maps as the one with best satellite data, OpenStreetMap maybe. Have to find a good control which does the magic.
  
• Some art work, for example an application icon.
  

So finally, to get that little tool, all you have to do is download the 436 kByte zip file, unpack and install it. There's of course no warranty whatsoever.

And of course a Merry Christmas to anyone who celebrates it, and a happy new year.

QTH aka Maidenhead geo locator

QTH over Europe,
by Mysid at Wikimedia Commons

At an unexpected place - the monthly astronomy magazine Sterne und Weltraum - I discovered another system for the alphanumerical encoding of a geographic location. The QTH or Maidenhead locator of the first level consists of two letters and two digits, encoding a rectangle of 1 degree latitude and two degrees of longitude. For higher accuracy a second group of two letters is added, which then encodes a rectangle of 2.5' of latitude by 5' of longitude. At this level, with just six characters a rectangle not wider than 12 kilometer is uniquely encoded.

Bz splitting these into 100 subsquares encoded by their number makes the squares 30" in longitude and 15" in latitude, or less than 500 meter. Rarely used is another group of two characters, which then reaches the accuracy of GPS receivers, and while the algorithm could allow more levels these obviously are nonsensical.

This locator is mostly used by amateur radio stations, not my field of interest, but for whatever reason this locator is also used in the satellite tracking software GPredict which was tested in the magazine. I already found a free implementation of this algorithm and included it into my code, same as I did previously with the Geohash, but it does not yet work fully and I did not yet have the time to debug and fix the probably minor glitch in my modification.

Not really a necessary addition, as the only system of encoding geographical locations used by the Thai authorities is the MGRS variant of UTM, it is still a nice gimmick in my geo class when I make it fully work.

Provincal marker stones and their accuracy of coordinates

In the latest issue of the geo: magazine I stumbled on an article titled "Are WGS84 and ETRS89 really identical?". Though the article is basically an advert for an application to convert between the two coordinate systems, the interesting fact which I wasn't aware of before is that additionally the the coordinate system WGS84 used by GPS there's the ETRS89 used in Europe simply to avoid the change of coordinates due to continental shift. With an annual movement of the Eurasian Plate of 2.5 cm the difference between the two coordinate frames will grow by one meter every 40 years. As GPS has an accuracy of about 10 meters, the difference between the two systems is not that relevant for most applications, though there are of course some few where a few centimeter make a difference.

While I haven't found values for the plate movements relative to WGS84 for any location in Thailand, since (southern) Thailand is on the Sunda Plate together with Singapore, the movement of an observatory there can give an idea for the speed further north. There it has a movement of 6 mm per year in latitude and 28 mm in longitude, a similar speed value as for Europe, so also there it's about one meter every 40 years.

Now to relate this with the administrative subdivisions, in 2008 I found a marker within the administrative center of Surat Thani, located between province hall and provincial court. This marker shown in the photo has inscribed the location of itself, both with longitude and latitude in degrees as well as the coordinates in the UTM system. Due to the reflections its not easy to read in the photo, but the values give a latitude of 9° 7' 58.32484'' North and a longitude of 99° 19' 53.90800'' East in WGS84. The UTM values are a Northing of 1,009,256.493 and an Easting of 536,772.956 in the Indian 1975 frame. As the UTM coordinates are measured in meters one can directly see the accuracy of the coordinate, which is 1 Millimeter! 0.00001 arcseconds at the equator correspond to 0.3 Millimeter, so even more accuracy. Given the above words of plate movement, as well as the inherit inaccuracy of GPS both values have a ridiculous accuracy, anything below one meter I cannot believe. I really wonder if any geographer was involved in the creation of this marker and how they came up with the last digits of these numbers, or if they were pressed by some official who though more accuracy is better, and any reason they last digits are simply nonsense were overheard.

When I was looking for the location of PAO office in Trang, I noticed that in panoramio someone had uploaded photos of a very similar stone located right in front of the PAO office, on the backside of the province hall. On the detail view one can see the same ridiculous accuracy of the coordinates. Though I had visited a few more province hall, I haven't noticed such a stone at any other than Surat Thani; would be interesting to know which other province halls have one, or even get some more background on how these markers were created.

TAO office outside the Tambon?

So far I believed that the office of the local administrations is always located within the area they administer. But when I was working through the TAO of Tak province, and tried to add the locations of the offices into the XML as well, the TAO Ban Na came out oddly. When I first found a placemark labeled with it in Longdo map, I already wondered why it is located so close to the district office and thus within Sam Ngao subdistrict, so I put the location into the XML only as a comment. Anyway, there's no building directly at the mark, even for the district office I had to guess a bit as none of the buildings looked like the normal large district office buildings.

Now I looked into them again, I tried again to verify the location, but none of the other sources gave anything - Wikimapia only marks one school around there. The website of the TAO Ban Na was offline, but still in the Google cache, and there I found the address - องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลบ้านนา (ที่ว่าการอำเภอสามเงาหลังเก่า) ม.5 ต.สามเงา อ.สามเงา จ.ตาก (TAO Ban Na, old district office Sam Ngao, Mu 5, Sam Ngao subdistrict, Sam Ngao district, Tak province). Now there are of course TAO which cover more than one subdistrict, but this is not the case here - Ban Na only covers the subdistrict Ban Na, whereas Sam Ngao subdistrict is shared between TAO Sam Ngao and the Sam Ngao subdistrict municipality.

Once I found with Wikimapia that there is a new district office located close to the Bhumipol dam airport, the old district office as the location of the TAO Ban Na became easy to place. But still, it is located within the boundaries of the municipality and thus well outside the area which is governed from there. Finally, I even succeeded to locate the municipality office, close to the new district office, only the location for the TAO Sam Ngao I failed to find.

Now I am just wondering why this TAO is such a special case. One reason could be of course the topography on Ban Na subdistrict, which covers only the mountainous areas around the Bhumipol lake and therefore hardly any bigger settlement with the infrastructure for an office building. The whole subdistrict has just a population of 2145. And I am of course wondering if this is the only such case, or if there are any other offices located outside their area of responsibility.

New Google Earth imagery for Thailand

Since Google started to push new imagery to Google Earth twice a month I no longer reported on these updates here, as with the more frequent updates there often were only very few areas in Thailand which received an update, and I also did not want this blog to become just to be yet another Google Earth blog. However, the latest update last week was a really massive one, and not only in Thailand it seems they rolled out much more new data than usual.

Already when the inofficial Google Earth Blog reported the new imagery I noticed areas with new data - either because I could remember the area to have no hires yet, or because I noticed that there were district office locations I had not yet worked into my XML because I could not make out the building in the lores imagery. Most notably, these were parts of Phatthalung province (sadly not yet the town of Phatthalung itself), and an area east of Nan town. But with the official KML where Google marks all the updated areas I learned I found just a small portion of all the changes. In the boundary area to Myanmar in Tak province as well as in Rayong and Chanthaburi at the east coast I could finally get district office location very exact, which are now in my XML and my own KML of administrative offices.

As I mentioned Phatthalung before - while the new hires area comes short of covering the provincial capital, it covers the area between the town and the lake. And while browsing around there, I noticed that it has the old palace of the province governor in there, now yet another item on my long list of places I still want to visit in Thailand. This location also nicely confirms the history of Mueang district - in 1917 the district was renamed to Lampam, the subdistrict where this palace is located. In 1924 however the administration was moved westwards towards the newly built train station.

Red dot in Google Earth

In a thread at the ThaiVisa forum - which I only noticed because a friend of this blog guided the readers here for more detailed information - the question came up what the red dot in Google Earth found for every Tambon is supposed to mean.

The above screenshot shows the area around the office of the subdistrict municipality Wat Pradu (เทศบาลตำบลวัดประดู่), located between Surat Thani city and Phunphin. The yellow marker is from my collection of office locations, and as I have passed the office several times I can even show a photo of the office complex - though a not that good one as I was on the wrong side of the big highway. One can see well that the red dot for Wat Pradu is located almost exactly on the office buildings as well. And when looking at the same area in Google Maps, instead of the red dot the name of the subdistrict shows up at the same location.

If this were the case for every Tambon I would have no problem to get XML full with all the locations, and it would be boring to write about these dots. For another office close by, the TAO Bang Chana (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลบางชนะ), Google places its dot into a palm plantation in the north of the subdistrict, whereas the placemark in Longdo Map points to an actual building in the very south. Though it is close to the city Surat Thani I haven't been able to verify that location yet, but in this case I believe the Thai map of Longdo much more than Google.

Another thing is that it seems Google has exactly one red dot per subdistrict, so they cannot correspond to the local government units exactly - there are subdistricts with two of them, for example Khanom subdistrict, Khanom district, Nakhon Si Thammarat has both a subdistrict municipality and a TAO, and the red dot points near the district office but nowhere near neither of the two local government offices. and for Talad subdistrict within the city of Surat Thani the red dot is within a private villa, even though there is no administrative office for this subdistrict at all. I'd be curious where did Google get the coordinates for these placemarks at first...

Google maps business for Thai government agencies

When writing about the upgrade of Bu Kraeng TAO to a municipality, I tried to find the location of the TAO office with Google Maps as well. However, Google placed it right next to the district office of Chom Phra, clearly wrong, but then I tried to locate the office of Chom Phra instead.

Google Maps placed the municipality office about 2 kilometer southweat of the district office, but somehow the building there did not look that much as an office building. So I looked at the website of the municipality to maybe find a photo of the office and confirm Google - but then I instead found that I found one of the few local government websites who made use of Google Maps themselves already. Embedded on one subpage is the map I also include below, showing the boundary of the municipality, the location of the district office, the district assembly hall, two schools and also the municipality office.


ดู แผนที่เทศบาลตำบลจอมพระ ในแผนที่ขนาดใหญ่กว่า

But back to the first location - when looking at it again, when clicking on the icon returned by the search the popup among others showed a "edit details" link. The search had returned me one of the business entries in Google Maps, a collection of placemarks imported from various business address books. Here in Germany, these are usually pointing directly to the building they belong, but for the rare cases where they are wrong anyone can correct them - unless the business owner claims them and then all other editing is blocked. The reason for the wrong location is probably the difficulty to parse a Thai address, which is based on lot numbers and not the more straight-forward street numbers used here. As the lot numbers have no logical order, one would need a full database of lot number locations to parse an address into a geolocation. At least for the entry of the municipality office Chom Phra, with the help of their own Google map, I have now fixed the location. But there are still many many such wrong locations waiting for their business owners or volunteer correctors, I even had seen a resort on Samui placed into Surat Thani city, only because that is the province capital...

Geohash

On the Thai blog of geography professor Phisan Santitamnont I stumbled over a posting on a new way to encode geographical locations named Geohash, advertised as the "ultimate Geocode". As I do some geocoding both for my private photos as well as for the administrative offices within my Tambon project, I found a good description in the Wikipedia article on Geohash.

It turns out that it is yet another way to encode a geographical coordinate into alphanumeric characters, bearing a few similarities with the UTM and MGRS coordinates. But other than those it does no complicate mathematics to make the geoid flat for having simple linear coordinates, it simply encodes the angular coordinates into binary code, which then is converted into characters using a base32 algorithm, similar with how binary data is sent in email. Nothing difficult for a programmer, so I have added a C# class into my coding project already.

Basically, the Geohash is a very compact but still readable way to encode a coordinate, a bit like those URL shortening one has to use in Twitter to keep the tweets within the 140 characters. For example w4rqn6k89ysst is the most accurate location for the Bangkok Noi district office. The length of the code depends on how much accurate one wants it to be, for 8 characters the error is about 20 meter, if cutting the last character the code stays valid but has then an error of 80 meter - actually the error is in arcseconds so the actual length differs on the location on the globe. Another good point is that the algorithm is completely in the Public Domain, as there is already a similar approach being patented - one of the infamous software patents.

Now while this Geohash is a nice thing, I doubt I'd be able to use it anywhere - within my XMLs I use the W3C standard to encode the locations, and all of the government publications use UTM anyway. Besides, these hash codes aren't really human readable, whereas the standard angular coordinates in XML are.

Thai MGRS grid

Ever since I was first infected with the idea of a Thai Geograph website - the blog One Tambon One Photo is the training ground for it - I had been slowly been implementing code for geographic coordinate transformation, mostly to be able to parse the coordinates in the boundary definition announcements. Now I had the necessary algorithms, understood the MGRS coordinate system used by geograph and how they define their squares, hecards and myriads, I now created some code to create these squares for Thailand as well.

View Larger Map
As you can see in the map, there are exactly 100 MGRS squares each covering 10,000 km² spread over Thailand, except those squares at the UTM zone boundary at 102° East. Someone better at graphic art can now use that KML file and the country boundaries to create a nice appealing emblem for Thai Geograph.

Actually, I did this coding not for this purpose, but to easier parse the coordinates in the Royal Gazette announcements - those few I tried sometimes had a wrong letter code, sometimes the letters were omitted as being clear from the rough location, or even had obvious wrong codes. With this and smaller scale grids I can easier notice where the subdistrict or village boundary marker is supposed to be, when the direct coordinate conversion fails.

By the way, my readers in Germany might be interested in the Geograph Germany, which just now reached 1% coverage - but still more than 300,000 square kilometer without a photo.

GPS and Thai UTM coordinates

Whenever in Royal Gazette announcements geographical locations like boundaries of the administrative subdivisions are mentioned, these are given in a special coding not directly understandable. Few months ago I cracked the code, when in the announcement of a municipal boundary change I understood that e.g. VE ๒๐๔๕๐๘ means the UTM coordinate 48Q4204 19508. However converting the UTM coordinate into longitude and latitude it did not fully fit with the place marked in the map enclosed in the announcement.

A year ago I found Excel sheets at the DOPA website which asked the local administrations to check the names of the administrative villages (Muban) and fill in the coordinates in UTM notation. With the first filled sheets now available I now had a lot of UTM coordinates to be parsed, and therefore had to look for code to convert them into "normal" geographic coordinates. I not only found that, but also learned a whole new thing about geographic coordinates, that additionally to the two coordinates one has to give the datum, which mostly covers the parametrization of the flatness of the earth globe. Google Earth as well as GPS uses the WGS84 datum, however in Thailand coordinates most usually are given in the Indian 1975 datum, including those UTM coordinates for the Muban. The two coordinates differ by about 80 metres, still enough to make a pointer to a specific building point to a totally different one, especially in more densely settled areas. The different datums even led to a serious misalignment of various layers in Google Maps, luckily not for Thailand.

Yet, not all instances use the Indian 1975 datum. A marker stone I found between the provincial hall and the provincial court of Surat Thani has the exact geographic location of that place, given in the WGS84 standard retrieved with the GPS system. That stone inscription reads 9° 7' 58.32484'' N 99° 19' 53.9080'' E, assuming this value is correct it means the Google Earth imaginary of Surat Thani is misaligned by about 2 metres. But I somehow doubt the accuracy given in the inscription - 0.0001 arcseconds means about 3 millimetres, way beyond the accuracy possible with GPS. IMHO at least two digits of the numbers are simply bogus.

MapJack

It will still take years until Google's Streetview will come to Thailand, but already now it has a similar website showing views from the road for a few selected towns named MapJack. From what they write on their website, they take a much simpler and therefore cheaper approach than Google, but still their views are very worth exploring.

To make it fit with the topic of this blog, I have selected all the views of administrative offices within the towns available, I can share my own photograph only for the town hall of Hua Hin - I missed the district office even though it was just on the other side of the crossing, and most of the offices in Ayutthaya.

• Hua Hin: Municipality office, District office
• Pai: District office
• Pattaya: Municipality office
• Mae Hong Son: Municipality office, District office (hardly visible), Province hall, Provincial court
• Ayutthaya: Province hall, Provincial court, District office, Municipality office, City pillar
• Phuket: Province hall, Phuket municipality office, Thep Krasattri municipality office, Karon municipality office, Patong municipality office, District office Mueang Phuket, District office Thalang
• Chiang Mai: Municipality office, District office
• Krabi: Province hall, Provincial court, District office, Municipality office, PAO office, City pillar

Collection of administrative office locations

For some time already I have added the geographical locations of the administrative into the XML files of my Tambon coding project. Now I have programmed a simple conversion of these XMLs wit locations into a KML file used in Google Earth, so I can easily display all the coordinates I have collected already.

In the map below is always the current version, which at the time of writing includes

• Province halls (blue marker), 65 out of 75
• District offices (green marker), 591 out of 927 (including those in Bangkok)
• PAO offices (red marker), 10 out of 75
• TAO (white marker), 74 out of 2105
• Municipalities (yellow marker), 99 out of 5671

View Larger MapThe placemarks right now have no contents except the coordinates, unlike the one from an earlier experiment where I embedded photos and Wikipedia links, but for now I have concentrated on the essential things.

Quite obviously the coordinates are for from complete - for the district offices I have locations for all and only omitted those where Google Earth has no hires data yet to verify the accurate location. But especially for the municipalities and TAO these are quite difficult to find - some are from WikiMapia, for Samut Prakan Richard Barrow collected a few, rarely the website of the local government unit has a decent map which allows the identification in Google Earth.

So I can only call everyone interested to help making this collection more complete. You can send me any addition or correction by email, or if you have a lot and don't mind the XML editing you can join in the coding project and edit the XML yourself.

One Tambon One Photo

Last month an old fellow from the Thai forums contacted me to discuss his idea of creating a Thailand offspring of Geograph. Geograph is a Web 2.0 project which aims to collect representative photographs and information on every square kilometer of Great Britain and Ireland. The project is very successful, as one can see in the map to the right many areas a fully red, the color chosen for squares having at least one photo. A German offspring has been launched already as well, but there the map is still green almost everywhere - I did not heard about that one before, but now already uploaded some of my photo stock from my home country.

But this blog is on Thailand, and it is just a natural idea to extend this project to more countries, so he had this idea but not the ability to set up and host such a big site. Besides, to make a Geograph Thailand really work it must be bilingual, most Thai would be too shy to contribute on an English only website, and without Thai contributors it will be hard to get much content. So in order to promote this idea and find more co-workers, he instead now started a blog titled "One Tambon One Photo", to collect and present a representative photo for each of the 7255 subdistricts (Tambon). With a daily posting, this blog can run for 19 years without repeating itself, though quite clearly it will get more difficult once the touristic hotspots have been covered. Yet I am sure there are many potential non-Thai contributors who'd like to present their photos from remote places, so this blog could become a fun collaborative project as well as just interesting to read.

New Google Earth hires data for Thailand

Yesterday Google rolled out another update of their imaginary in Google Earth. I tried to look myself if I can spot newly covered areas myself, but only noticed that the Tai Rom Yen national park in Surat Thani now has hires data - but that's almost only jungle. When Google today officially announced the areas updated they for the first time provided a KML file which marks all the updated areas (kudos to Google Earth Blog who featured it), especially as in the official announcement no mention of Thailand at all.

It turns out that I was right with the national park, which in fact was the only update for all of southern Thailand. What I missed was a strip southeast of Sisaket including Khun Han district, the center of Amnat Charoen province and Tha Pla district in Uttaradit. Thus only a small update, but now another 5 district articles on Wikipedia got their location exactly pinpointed to the district office, and one more city pillar shrine added in my Lak Mueang map.

Geotagging blog posts

Google now added a new feature to the Blogger website which I was missing ever since I started blogging, especially once I started with my Travel blog - geotagging blog postings. A blog posting can be related to one specific location, so it makes a lot of sense adding this metainformation in a machine readable format to the posting. It not only helps users to have an easy way to get to a map of the area, it also makes it possible to search the other way round - which blog postings are related to the area I am interested in. Given the fact that Google has two great mapping tools - Google Maps and the Google Earth software, and also several other sites in the Google universe already allow to geotag contents - most notably the photo site Panoramio, but also the second photo site Picasa, even Youtube videos can be geotagged. So it was only a matter of time until they added it to Blogger, though I wished they did it earlier. Actually, it is not yet fully there, right now it is only available in the testing Blogger Draft engine, but that means I can already use it now.

I have already tagged all of the postings in my travel blog, and also in this blog all those specific for one location. For some the location is only approximate, like when I write about a specific municipality but don't know the exact location of its office which would be the best choice for a "central point". There are also few cases where I could not add a geotag yet, like the recent Muban renamed - I simply cannot find that one on any map...

Since there is still a small bug in the feed generated - the namespace for GeoRSS isn't included and thus GoogleMaps does not recognize it as a feed with geotags - the map below is created from the feed of my travel blog patched to make it show in GoogleMaps. But I am confident that this bug will be fixed soon and you can use the feeds of my blogs in whatever geographical mashups you can imagine...

Google Earth update

Google Earth has rolled out another set of new areas in higher resolution, but as there was no announcement in their own blog yet, the inofficial Google Earth Blog has collected the places reported by readers. In Thailand I did find the following places to have new higher resolution:

• Thung Song, Nakhon Si Thammarat
• A longer strip in Mae Hong Son province, from Mae La Noi via Mae Sariang down till Sop Moei
• Wiang Kaen, Chiang Rai
• Some boundary area in Nong Khai, since a large area around Vientiane was updated
• Also a piece of jungle west of Hua Hin

But it has only had 4 district articles on Wikipedia which I could place better with these data, for those in Mae Hong Son I already got the right coordinates with PointAsia. If I missed any places in the above list let me know.

Automatic map for district office locations

Inspired by a posting on the Google Earth blog I have created a Google spreadsheet with all the location data for districts as well as the municipality - well, "all" means what it will have when I am finished with editing the spreadsheet, right now it just a few entries to play with. They nifty thing about this - the same was as in that other application on the Starbucks closures I now can get a dynamical map with all the location marks, updated every time I edit anything in the spreadsheet. Since this map requires a Google Maps API key I cannot embed it here, but you can see it on my website. Something I haven't yet found it how to export this dynamic map in KML, so it can be included into Google Earth as well.

While this automatic map is of course just a new toy, filling this spreadsheet with the location data forces me to check all the locations, especially which ones I did confirm with the hires data of Google Earth already, and for the remaining ones what is the actual source of them. Then when there's the next update within Google Earth with new hires data for Thailand I can more easily check which Wikipedia articles I have to update. I also added one location in simple Geo syntax to the XMLs in my coding project, so working through all the districts once more I should now add the location into the XML directly as well.

My google maps

I have been creating some maps for postings to this blog before using Google Maps, which are easy to embed into the posts. But in case you want to see all these maps together, including those which haven't been featured in a blog post yet, you can simply look at my Google Maps profile. As most of these maps are incomplete - obviously they only contain those places I could pinpoint on a map - any help in completing them is welcome. As it's possible to collaborate on a map by several users, though sadly not in a real wiki sense like in Wikimapia, anyone who wants help to make these maps more authoritative is welcome, just contact me and I will add you to the collaborators for those maps you like to edit.

It's a pity the team at blogger.com hasn't yet added the ability to add a georeference to single log postings, as it would be quite nice to have those blog postings which can be pinpointed to a specific place displayed in a map automagically - especially useful for my travel blog. But as they did this for YouTube, another site owner by Google, I guess it won't take that long till that feature will show up here as well. Geotags within a RSS feed with the GeoRSS standard is nothing new anymore...

Yet another Google Earth data update

Without any announcement in their blog, Google Earth has added quite a lot new tiles in hires for various parts of Thailand today. Strangely, the new data is already also present in Google Maps, so I cannot use that one to verify which places are new and which not. As usual, the following list is probably not complete, but at least can point you to new places worth browsing now.

• Surat Thani: Tha Chana, Ban Na San, Vibhavadi and Don Sak - sadly the town Don Sak itself under a cloud. Also, the area around Chaiya, but omitting the interesting part - Talad Chaiya and Phumriang town
• Chumphon: Sawi
• Phetchaburi: the town Phetchaburi itself, and also Khao Yoi
• Samut Songkhram: Amphawa, Bang Konthi
  Ratchaburi: Damnoen Saduak - now finally the floating market can be seen in hires, though it's not really spectacular from above
• Kanchanaburi: Sangkhlaburi
• Khon Kaen: Wiang Kao - but which building there is the district office, Wiang Kao is the last district article in Wikipedia which has no coordinates yet
• Chiang Rai: Mae Fa Luang, including the Doi Tung royal villa.