What is this anyway?
Most online maps absolutely suck for discovery, and they're also pretty terrible when you don't quite know what you want to do.
Your site is slow on mobile, and you suck.
Yeah, sorry about that. That's a deliberate tradeoff I've made in the design of this site — I really, really don't want to handle your sensitive personal information, including where you are specifically in the world. To maintain your privacy, all location filtering is done inside your browser, instead of sending your location to my server.
That's great, but the downside is, you end up downloading a bunch of place information for the rest of Australia and Aotearoa that you don't actually need. But it's highly cacheable, so if you travel around a bit, you shouldn't need to download it again.
Where do you get the data from?
Data is primarily sourced from the community-built, free, editable world map that is OpenStreetMap (OSM). All of the data in OSM is licensed under a permissive, open data license, the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL), which means you can use that data for your own projects, you can contribute to the largest shared map of the world, and you can browse that data yourself.
Being a community project, OSM isn't complete, nor is it authoritative — local mappers in your community contribute to the data and keep it (mostly) up to date, but there's always parts that need help. If you spot something missing here, or incorrect data, it's likely sourced from OSM and might be out of date. You can edit OSM data by creating an account on OpenStreetMap, and it's easy to get started.
At some point, I'll post some technical details on how the data is processed, but the tl;dr is that there's a bunch of filters on OSM tags that feed into every category here, as well as some personally-created and curated items too.
In addition to OSM data, this site relies on Creative Commons-licensed data from the ABS, and from Stats NZ. They both publish a dataset of urban areas that is used to form the bounding boxes for the search on this site, and you can use that boundary data for your own projects too.
Where can I get that upstream data?
- OpenStreetMap offers an export function, in addition to the global-scale Planet OSM export, updated weekly. You likely want to start with extracts limited to a smaller area, unless you have a massive server to handle the data import (128GB of RAM recommended).
- The Australian Bureau of Statistics makes the Significant Urban Areas dataset available under a Creative Commons license. If you're not familiar with ABS location structures, you'll want to read up about statistical geography structures to understand how they're created.
- Stats NZ also defines statistical geography for Aotearoa, with the similar concept of Functional Urban Areas. The functional urban areas used for search on this site include the primary and secondary urban centres, as well as the hinterland areas. Only metropolitan areas, large regional centres, and medium regional centres from the dataset are used. This was chosen to align with the 10,000 persons cutoff used for ABS Significant Urban Areas.