[OSM-Talk-ZA] [CLUG-tech] South Africa location database.

[Marcel Berteler]

I would be interested in adding my 5 cents as we have a project that 
could directly benefit from this.

One good place to get some other interested people would be 
talk-za at openstreetmap.org, the ZA mailing list of Openstreetmap. These 
people are quite far in mapping the whole of SA.

In our own project (www.umsebenzi.gov.za) we needed to locate all the 
registered people as accurate as possible. We therefore choose to use 
the database of the Post Office
 as that seems to be the most up to date and inclusive database that is 
freely available.
We looked at other databases but when comparing them, we found the SAPO 
DB to be the most inclusive and possibly most recognizable to people on 
the ground.

The database of Stats SA is outdated and not maintained. It basically 
was accurate when the last census was done in 2001.
i quote Stats SA from an email I received from them:

/"Basically, suburbs and villages on our database (referred to as 
sub-places) were demarcated for Census 2001. There are about 21 000 
listed. Sub-places are further grouped into what we call main-places 
(which roughly correspond to tribal areas and towns). There are 3 109 
main-places on our Census 2001 database."/

The database of the Municipal Demarcation Board was the other database 
we looked at, but they seem to get it from a commercial vendor. I quote:

/"We source our suburbs from SVP (GISCOE) I would advise you to contact 
them to get the correct capturing methods and validation."/

We therefore choose to go with the SAPO database.

Than, you refer to going the Province -> District Municipality -> 
Regional Municipality -> sub-urb route.

This is how we would like to use it as well, but it does involve a lot 
of work as the SAPO DB is not linking their main parents to a 
municipality and this has to be done manually.

An other interesting initiative is the location finder that can be found 
on: http://www.karabo.org.za

As you can see, they use the SAPO DB as well, but leave the municipality 
layer out. Probably because they also did not feel like doing this manually.

well, that it from my side ito where to get data from.

How to store and manage the data? Not sure at this moment but I agree 
that it has to be managed and controlled and when used for 'real' 
projects backwards compatibility as well as language independence needs 
to be ensured.  ie: name changes and double names like 'Kaapstad' en 
'Cape Town' which both appear in the SAPO DB.

Once we have agreed on how to store and manage the data I am happy to 
'donate' the db that we currently have that has all the child-parent 
relationships in place.

Marcel

Deon Bredenhann wrote the following on 2008/09/25 08:12:
> Hi all
>
> I have been toying with the idea of creating a database of locations in
> South-Africa. The trick is that it should be hierarchical and the data
> must be open for anyone to use. It would be nice if and town_id 457 in
> my database and town_id 457 in your database both point to the same
> town.
> Now from info I found on Wikipedia, it seems that every municipality has
> a code. Towns cannot have postal codes as the key, as some towns have
> more than one postal code. Now my suggestion so far for the hierarchy is
> as follows.
> Province -> District -> Municypality -> Town
> Western Cape -> Cape Winelands District -> Stellenbosh Municypality ->
> Franschhoek
> Now we have a distinct hierarchy of locations and for each location we
> can add additional info. (GPS co-ords, names in different languages,
> postal codes)
>
> Now to come to the tech part for Clug-tech
> I started playing with Google Appengine yesterday and it seems pretty
> straight forward. The code for the app should be open and the data
> should be available under the Creative Commons. What format should the
> data be available in. XML seems like such a bloat, but on the other
> hand, anyone can write an exporter for the format they would like and
> include it in the current app.
>
> Now, I'm thinking that users should not be able to edit the data
> directly, but submit patches for the data to be included. This can go
> through review and get included in the database. We've all seen how
> malicious people can get with Wikipedia. So how would this be done?
>
> So? Is there anyone interested in a project like this? Is there any
> people who want to call me an idiot and point me to a place where this
> is already available? Would it be useful to any of you?
>
> All input will be appreciated. Please let me know what you think.
>
>
>   

-- 
Regards,

Marcel Berteler

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