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.

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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".

How many tambon are there in Thailand?

I always thought that the question on the number of Tambon (subdistrict) is a trivial one, as several government publication list the number of subdivisions, and they all consistently give a number of 7255 (or 7424 if including the subdistricts of Bangkok, which however actually are a different type of administrative unit) - for example the 2012 list from DOPA, or the 2013 list I didn't noticed yet. I never questioned that number, as I thought the department within the Ministry of Interior would know their numbers well.

But now I am in email contact with someone who has compiled his own lists of municipalities and subdistricts, and then cross-checked then with my spreadsheet. Quite helpful, it showed several cases where I had small mistakes within my lists, as well as clearing up some in his lists. He had a few more subdistricts in his list than me, and I also had a subdistrict named Som Kai (ตำบลสมก๋าย) in Chiang Mai listed as an active subdistrict, even though it was one which was not created, but got a the geocode 50061400 assigned already. But after removing that one, I noticed I still have one subdistrict too much - the corresponding sheet had 7425 subdistricts, thus 7256 Tambon.

Checking with the population numbers from DOPA, the additional Tambon stayed, apparently there are 7256 populated Tambon. Next step then was to check with a Excel sheet showing the subdivision numbers for each province, which also had 7255 Tambon altogether - and with that one I could nail it down to be Nakhon Si Thammarat province to have the additional subdistrict. According to that spreadsheet (and several other sources), the province has 169 Tambon - actually a lot of source show a number of 165, even the website of the province administration itself, which is even more wrong. But I have 170 Tambon, and with a 2003 book listing all the Muban I was able to find the culprit - Pak Phanang district is listed there without the subdistrict Pak Phanang (ตำบลปากพนัง). The only thing special about that subdistrict is the fact that it is completely covered by the town Pak Phanang (เทศบาลเมืองปากพนัง), and thus has no subdivision in to Muban anymore, nor any village or subdistrict headmen. But that is not unique to this Tambon, there are several of this kind in larger towns or cities. In fact, the subdistrict was identical with the area of the town until the town was enlarged in 1993 [Gazette].

Center of Pak Phanang district in 2003

With two offices within DOPA contradicting already, I wasn't able to find any more solid proof in either direction. amphoe.com for example includes a map showing the Tambon of Pak Phanang with only 17 Tambon, even the Royal Gazette is no help - obviously there is no announcement abolishing this subdistrict, but an announcement from 2003 defining the boundaries of the subdistricts again only lists 17 subdistrict. Another announcement from the same year however on land expropriation includes a map which shows this subdistrict.

If anyone can help to clear up this confusion I would be happy, so far I can only find that something is very odd around there.

Municipal changes announced

Yesterday, another two municipal changes were announced in the Royal Gazette.

• Chao Phraya Surasak (เทศบาลนครเจ้าพระยาสุรศักดิ์) in Chonburi province was upgraded from a subdistrict municipality (Thesaban Tambon) to a city (Thesaban Nakhon). In March, the boundary of the municipality with the TAO Nong Khem was defined, and thanks to the comment of a reader I learned that this was done in preparation of upgrading the municipality. In the same month the upgrade was approved by the Board to consider draft laws, and the Royal Gazette announcement was then signed in April and became effective May 1st.
• Hua Khwang subdistrict municipality (เทศบาลตำบลหัวขวาง) in Maha Sarakham was renamed to Kosum Phisai (เทศบาลตำบลโกสุมพิสัย) effective July 9 [Gazette]. he municipality is located in the central part of Kosum Phisai district and includes the district office within its area, so the new name makes sense. It also allows to upgrade the TAO Hua Khwang (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบลหัวขวาง) covering the remaining part of the subdistrict Hua Khwang to a municipality, then no new name has to be created. However that probably won't happen soon, as just last October a new mayor and council were elected, and normally the TAO are upgraded at the end of the four year terms. Interestingly, it seems the name change was not approved by the Board to consider name changes - unlike other name changes, no meeting reference was given in either the announcement nor in the meeting transcript of the board to consider draft laws.