Any idea where I can buy a SUBURBS SQL DB for South Africa please?

I have one from http://www.geopostcodes.com/ but it’s missing so much data and really unreliable for South Africa.

I really appreciate your help…

Stev

Thorsten

You could make use of the OpenStreetMap.org dataset & API. It has suburbs defined in several ways (looking at the results from “Constantia, Cape Town, South Africa.”)

Most of the major municipalities make their GIS datasets available to the public, for free/cost of media – you can contact the Cape Town GIS unit and obtain shapefiles of their suburbs, the road center-lines, etc and edit & upload from that base.

vale,
Nick

Not totally born again to the JC, I mean JS world ;)

I still need this data in SQL Server (and ultimately .NET ;). Let’s just say it is an enterprise architecture constraint that I don’t have control over. I’ll post another post today that will make sense of what I/we are trying to do. But more than anything I’m wanting a colloquial database of suburbs rather than a governmental one. So this’ll turn into a basic MVC app (geowiki) that will allow point editing and suburb joining via a parent suburb – as described.

I have 10 000 data rich points of interest in a SQL Server database (2008), these points are geography objects. My desire is to do queries like “give me all points of type x in STEnvelope y” [well that’s the pseudo code of it anyway]. There are other cool queries you can do in SQL Server geospatial like give me all suburbs polygons that intersect with suburb x. Also SQL Server geospatial queries are an order of magnitude faster than queries where longitude and latitude are defined as decimals or floats and the bounding box is defined by max min x y constraints. I don’t even want to think about doing these queries on the client side, besides a lot of the queries happen through native mobile apps.

See you for No More Fluff.

ps. yes.. this should so be a MongoDB problem.

Secondly, LocationsZA is only 3MB in size. It’s enough to fit in memory all the time and never have to store in SQL Server.

Thirdly, it’s small enough in size to live in the browser, cached for a reasonable time.

Fourthly, if you do everything in JS, your parsing won’t be parsing by plain old JS object manipulation, which, together with some decent list comprehension, your code will shrink to a just a few simple lines.

Don’t stop having fun …

– Aslam

ps. Damn fine idea.. as a wiki I could imagine this becoming very useful.

Also I really want to be able to store parent suburbs like Greater Sandton (which as a yahoo polygon is tiny) which will include Morningside, Rivonia etc..

Also I want to expose WKT and not just KML shapes files, it seems like the Surveyor General’s data is quite obscure in that way – but then I’m and engineer and not a GIS person.

Love your work BTW.

StatsSA used to publish all the wards/municipalities (can’t remember if they did suburb/town) as shp files, but I see have pulled back on that now. You might be able to harass them for raw data.

The big question is how public can you make the data you get from them? You’d have to have a chat with them and read their terms. Maybe you’ll get lucky. I use the Surveyor General data on my streetmaps site with credit, that’s within the scope of the license; I’m not sure if wholesale repackaging and distributing would be too.