New license plate graphics

A week ago, five new provincial license plate graphics were announced in the Royal Gazette.

• Trat [Gazette]
  
  The graphic refers to the Franco-Thai war (1940-41), more specifically the battle of Ko Chang on January 17 1941. Three Thai ships were sunk during the battle, thus probably the ships to the right in the graphic are depicting the HTMS Chonburi, HTMS Songkhla and HTMS Thonburi.
  This seems to be first design for a license plate for Trat, there were no previous designs announced.
• Phetchabun [Gazette]
  
  To the left of the design are the fruits of the Tamarind tree, an important local product of Phetchabun province. The tamarind is also the provincial symbol tree for Ühetchabun. The star above and next to the tamarind fruits refers to the name of the province - Phetcha (เพชร) means diamond. The temple on the hill to the right is Wat Phra Son Kaeo (วัดพระธาตุผาแก้ว), one of the most spectacular Buddhist temples in the province.
  While the tamarind was present in the 2005 and 2009 designs as well, the temple was newly added, also the background was made much more colorful than before.
• Amnat Charoen [Gazette]
  
  To the right are rice ears, as (sticky) rice is the major agricultural product of the province. The flowers to the right are from the Butea monosperma tree, the symbol flower of the province. The background shows Khit cloth, a traditional woven fabric still produced in the traditional way in some areas of the Northeast, including Amnat Charoen.
  This seems to be first design for a license plate for Amnat Charoen, there were no previous designs announced.
• Chiang Mai [Gazette]
  
  As the 10 year loan of the to Panda to Chiang Mai Zoo has ended, the new license plate graphic - unlike the previous one from 2011 - no longer show any Panda. Again, Butea monosperma flowers are depicted, as this is also the provincial flower for Chiang Mai (and also Udon Thani and Lamphun). On the hill in the background the temple Wat Prathat Doi Saket is shown, one of the most famous temples in Thailand. To the left is a traditional Lanna house, with two Thais celebrating Songkhran by splashing with water. At the river another two persons celebrate Loi Krathong by floating the little candle boats. I am just not sure which temple is shown in the middle of the graphic.
• Maha Sarakham [Gazette]
  
  Again, Khit cloth is shown, as it is also a local product for Maha Sarakham. The flowers on top of the cloth are from the provincial flower, the White Frangipani (Plumeria alba). The river is the Chi river. The temple silhouette in the background probably is the pagoda of Wat Phra That Na Dun, located in Na Dun district.
  The 2006 design showed only the cloth and the flower.

As usual, I have added these graphics to the web album, where one can find all the recent graphics and many of the older as well - if times allows I will slowly complete it with all the old ones as well. If there is one specific missing, please let me know. After this announcements, there are still five provinces which seem to have such graphic yet, I don't know whether the announcements were not published in the Royal Gazette, or there is really no such designs yet for Nong Bua Lamphu, Mae Hong Son, Samut Songkhram, Ranong and Yala.

Local governments renamed

Today, four local governments name changes were announced in the Royal Gazette.

• Nong Saeng subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลหนองแสง), Wapi Pathum district, Maha Sarakham province renamed to Wapi Pathum (เทศบาลตำบลวาปีปทุม) to match with the name of the district. It also gives the TAO Nong Saeng, which shares the area of the subdistrict Nong Saeng with the municipality, the ability to be upgraded to a municipality without changing name. [Gazette]
• TAO Huai Thap Mon (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลห้วยทับมอญ), Khao Chamao district, Rayong province, renamed to Khao Chamao (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลเขาชะเมา), as it is the local government unit which contains the district office.
• TAO Bang Rachan (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลบางระจัน), Khai Bang Rachan district, Singburi province, renamed to Khai Bang Rachan (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลค่ายบางระจัน), as it is the local government unit which contains the district office.
• TAO Mai Ai (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลแม่อาย), Mae Ai district, Chiang Mai province, renamed to Doi Lang (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลดอยลาง), to avoid confusion with the subdistrict municipality Mae Ai (เทศบาลตำบลแม่อาย), especially once the TAO gets upgraded to a municipality.

All name changes took effect on October 18, the announcements were all signed on September 19 by the deputy minister of interior Pracha Prasobdee (ประชา ประสพดี). And all were discussed by the Board to consider draft laws in their meeting on August 21.

Streetview coverage of the Northeast started

While the systematic Google Streetview coverage is still limited to the provinces around Bangkok and Chiang Mai, and Phuket province as the only province in the South, already with the first batch of Streetview imagery two main roads were included - Phetkasem from Bangkok to Phuket and Phahon Yothin from Bangkok to the North. A similar single roundtrip by a Streetview car now started the coverage in the Northeast.

View Larger Map
Roundabout in Buriram in front of the Province Hall

The Isan roundtrip went through the provincial capitals of Sisaket, Surin, Buriram, Nakhon Ratchasima, Chaiyaphum, Khon Kaen, Maha Sarakham, Roi Et, Yasothon, Amnat Charoen and Ubon Ratchathani, and another two roads along the Thai-Cambodian border including up to the parking lot of Phreah Vihear. Also the main road along the border in Sa Kaeo and Trat province was added, including the border crossing in Aranyaprathet and Hat Lek.

So quite a lot of new opportunities for armchair traveling in areas less frequented by tourists, however for my task to collect the locations of the administrative offices the full coverage is much more useful, as not all the offices are located directly at the main road.

Wikidata

Many of the Wikipedia articles contain language-independent factlets, which have to be kept up-to-date in each language edition manually. If these factlets are stored at one central place - quite similar to the graphics used in Wikipedia articles which usually come from one separate Commons-Wiki - then these facts will be easily updated without speaking any of the languages of the Wikipedia articles in which they are used. Additionally, factlets organized in a more strict way than the human-readable text of the articles make other automatic processing possible. The Wikidata project does exactly this, more and more of the factlets in the Wikipedia articles can be imported automatically from the Wikidata Wiki.

The administrative subdivisions are one of the prime examples where this concept can be used, facts like the area, the population data, the country or province to which they belong, or the list of subdivisions already make up a good deal of a decent Wikipedia stub article. Especially the data which is displayed in the so-called infoboxes are mostly already includeable from Wikidata. One major thing which is not yet possible in Wikidata are lists, and not yet all of the data I am collecting has corresponding data categories (called properties in Wikidata). And it is a quite tedious work to add more than one factlet at one time manually, so to really get the Thai subdivision well-covered there I would have to learn how to use a bot for automatic editing.

One thing which already is imported completely on Wikidata are the language links to the Wikipedia article in various languages. In fact, every article which is available in more than one Wikipedia now has a corresponding page in Wikidata. Thus I now have added one more data item in my XML files, which can link every subdivision to the corresponding Wikidata page, and I am now slowly adding all the province and districts. And since OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia are another similar Wiki website which also has specific IDs for geographical entities (though one has to be careful to separate the office and the full entity), these are defined in the XSD as well. As an example, the province of Surat Thani now has these two links within the XML, which easily translate to URLs on WikiData and OpenStreetMap.

<entity type="Changwat" name="สุราษฎร์ธานี" english="Surat Thani" geocode="84">
  <wiki wikidata="Q240463" openstreetmap="1908825" /> 
</entity>
 

Census 2010

Already four years after the 2010 population and housing census was done in Thailand, finally the results got published by the National Statistics Office. However this announcement is really well hidden on the website of the NSO, their special website for the census did not see any update since 2010, and of course there the page which should give access to the data is still under construction. Thus unlike the 2000 census, there are no free PDF reports or Excel sheets available (yet?), only the printed books for each province and CD-ROM for each province, and those of course not for free.

But funnily the Google web crawler can be very helpful if a webmaster allows it crawl everything - when I was searching for the total population number of one province found in this census, Google returned me the PDF with the final report of that province, containing all the data - probably exactly the same as the printed book. For example for Nakhon Si Thammarat, the final report can be found here. That page seems to be something like a FTP access to the webserver itself, and within that folder one can find the final reports for the 2010 census for all provinces, and the preliminary reports for most province.

I am sure that it wasn't intended to make these PDFs available this way, but at least I now have all the census data in the same accuracy as I have for the 2000 census, just need to work a bit more to extract the numbers from the PDFs than I would have to do with XLS files. I don't know if the links above will continue to work long, if the webmaster ever notices that this is probably a big backdoor also useable to drop spam or malware on that server. Or if (and when) the 2010 data will still get published in the same way as the 2000 data, with XLS and PDFs easily found from the website.

DOPA entity numbers 2013

Though it was already published in April, I didn't noticed the annual list of numbers of the administrative entities until few weeks ago. This latest list as of December 31st 2012 states the following numbers.

• Provinces (Changwat, จังหวัด): 76
• Districts (Amphoe, อำเภอ): 878
• Subdistricts (Tambon, ตำบล): 7255 (though I believe the correct number is 7256)
• Villages (Muban, หมู่บ้าน): 74,963
• Provincial administrative organizations (PAO, อบจ): 76
• Municipalities (Thesaban, เทศบาล): 2266
  • Cities (Thesaban Nakhon, เทศบาลนคร): 29
  • Towns (Thesaban Mueang, เทศบาลเมือง): 167
  • Subdistrict municipalities (Thesaban Tambon, เทศบาลตำบล): 2070
• Subdistrict administrative organizations (TAO, อบต): 5509
• Special administrative units (องค์กรปกครองส่วนท้องถิ่นรูปแบบพิเศษ): 2

Compared with the data from 2012, there is of course no change in the central administrative units except seven newly created administrative villages (all where published in the Royal Gazette: one in Chumphon, three in Tak, two in Lampang and one in Yala). The number of municipalities increased a lot again by 184, and will do so in this year as well, so I will skip to check those numbers with my data for now and wait till the list of upgrades for this year is complete.

License plate designs for Satun, Loei and Kamphaeng Phet

End of last year, four license plate graphic designs were announced in the Royal Gazette, however I only showed Bueng Kan in detail then and promised to post about the other later. Well, being busy with other things, this slipped through until I was now asked by email for two of these three.

• Satun [Gazette]: Since the province is located at the Andaman sea, the graphic shows a beach scene. The rocks in the lower left look like they refer to Hin Ngam island, but for the other two rock structures I am not sure if they refer to a real place or are just an artists impression. However strangely this graphic is identical with the design already announced in 2008, so I don't understand why there was a new announcement.
• Loei [Gazette]: The design is a variation of the 2007 design [Gazette], still showing the Phu Kradueng hill with its plateau on top, a pine tree in front of the Lom Sak cliff also within Phu Kradueng National Park, and three acorn leaves - which however now look quite different from the ones in 2007. A new element added this time is the Phi Ta Khon mask.
• Kamphaeng Phet [Gazette]: The design for kamphaeng Phet changes a lot compared with the 2006 design [Gazette], the only element present in both designs are the banana trees. Newly added is a rice plant to the right, a waterfall in the background - probably Khlong Lan waterfall. Most prominently is the city wall, obviously referring to the name of the province which translates to "Diamond Wall".