Comments on: Welcome to the Open Data Catalogue

By: MadHutter

MadHutter — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:13:58 +0000

NZ Post have very firm ideas as to which suburb people live in too. I don’t know if you can download it as a dataset, but their online postcode finder will tell you what suburb NZ Post thinks a given address is in.

By: sealander

sealander — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:43:29 +0000

Regarding suburban boundaries – I used to work for a map publisher, and what we found was that the majority of cities in NZ do not have any official suburb boundaries. I think there were a couple of places that were the exception, (Hutt City might have been one of them) where the council actually put boundaries on their maps. Most councils are loathe to lay down any official boundary as people tend to have very firm ideas as to which suburb they live in

By: barnaclebarnes

barnaclebarnes — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:44:50 +0000

We will be working on that as well but we need to start somewhere and highlighting these areas via the ODC is a first step. We will be putting together guidelines on best practice for departments to follow when releasing data. Any input most welcome on the wiki.

By: Onyx

Onyx — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:09:12 +0000

Go, you good things! XLS spreadsheets everywhere…YUK. The sooner we open up the government’s data, the data we pay for but cannot access, the better. So are you going to be working on what formats government should be using?
Eg XML, ODT, ODS, YAML, SVG, etc etc
And then the political clout to actually overcome the inertia?
Big job guys, but Godspeed.

By: barnaclebarnes

barnaclebarnes — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:47:39 +0000

Hi Anita. It can be very difficult to get data out of local councils but we are making some progress. If you would like to help out identifying datasets is where we need help the most. If you look at the sources list and pick a department or organisation that you are interested in then submit any datasets they may have. You might also want to try Koordinates for the gradient maps. They have a lot of open geo-spatial data that you can access.

By: Anita Kean

Anita Kean — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:40:42 +0000

Thanks _so_ much for getting this off the ground. It has taken too long here!
I’ve tried and tried to access digital elevation information for Auckland streets to produce cycle route gradient maps (ideally online)- the city council and regional council agree it would be useful information but getting the (publicly-funded) data from them for such maps has proved impossible.

Happy to help out with this project!!