List of all Tasmanian Streets?

[Son of a Beach]

Does anybody know where I could find a list of all Tasmanian streets/roadsand their coordinates (or a single coordinate pair for each street - enough to locate one point on each street).

It occurred to me yesterday that my "BIt Map" iPhone mapping application could very easily be turned into a street index (or index for any list of information). All it needs is the one simple feature addition: Tapping on a waypoint in the list of waypoints in Route detail view should switch to a map that includes that waypoint, centre the map view on that waypoint, and display that waypoint (including text label) on the map view. So no worries, I implemented that this morning and it works very well.

Now all I need is a list of all Tasmanian street coordinates that I can massage into a KML file. Once I import that into Bit Map, I'll have a fully functional street index!

But I can't find where to get this information from anywhere.

(This feature could also be used for any other types of information... eg, list of all waterfalls, list of all mountains, etc - I might glean some of these from the wiki and try them out).

[Son of a Beach]

huh! That works beautifully!

I created a KML file based on the "High Places" list in the wiki (sorted alphabetically), and I now have a complete index of all Tasmania's mountains and "high places" on my iPhone. Tapping on one of them takes me straight to in on the map.

Now I'd really like to be able to do this for a complete list of Tasmanian streets, so does anyone know where I could find a list of coordinates for all Tasmanian streets?

[Maelgwn]

I doubt that such a thing exists for free. OSM (Open Street Map) should have that data in a few years?

[Son of a Beach]

I thought about Open Street Map, but I don't think that could provide such a list either. At least I'm not aware of any way to extract such a list from OSM.

Actually, I don't need the coordinates. All I need is a list of all the road/street names. (Original posts and title updated to reflect this).

Once I have the names, I can easily write a script to geocode each of them one by one to find the coordinates.

So is there anywhere I could simply get a list of all the street names for Tasmania?

[Son of a Beach]

I thought about Open Street Map, but I don't think that could provide such a list either. At least I'm not aware of any way to extract such a list from OSM.

Although OSM does link to http://www.geonames.org/ which looks interesting. Pity GeoNames' links to their downloads don't seem to be working at the moment.

[Son of a Beach]

huh! I've found what I need on theLIST. Of course, theLIST had to have the information in their database, but I wasn't sure if they provide access to it without using their commercial services. Well it turns out they do!

I simply typed "%" into the street field on their map search page ("%" being a wildcard in a lot search systems), and it appears to have eventually returned every address in their system (or at least a really HUGE list of addresses).

It will take some time to sanitise and massage the data that was returned, but I should be able to compile a complete and clean list of Tasmanian streets and roads out of this. Then it's a matter of writing a script to geocode each of them to get latitude and longitude, and then I'll have to further massage all that data into a KML file. Should be good!

[Taurë-rana]

It will take some time to sanitise and massage the data that was returned, but I should be able to compile a complete and clean list of Tasmanian streets and roads out of this. Then it's a matter of writing a script to geocode each of them to get latitude and longitude, and then I'll have to further massage all that data into a KML file. Should be good!

You obviously have way too much time on your hands Nik!

[Son of a Beach]

Obviously.

Well... mission complete! I've added to my theLIST results massaging script, and it now does a geocoding lookup of each entry, and extracts the latitude and longitude of each entry, and then combines the entire lot into KML.

I've now got a large KML file with all of Tasmania's streets and roads in it (at least all that have addresses in theLIST, as far as I can tell). Some of them are listed a few times (once for each suburb/postcode they pass through), which is OK. All the other duplicates have been removed (of which there were LOTS of course). That leaves me with 5845 placemark points in the KML file.

I've then uploaded that KML file into Bit Map's new as-yet-unreleased version on the iPhone, and can successfully use it as a street index now. Tapping on one of the street names in the long list shows me where that street is on my maps. It's a bit slow to display the list though. 5845 waypoints takes a little time for the iPhone to process.

(Also, thanks to the person who sent me details of another list of Tasmanian streets. In the end, since I was half way through producing this list myself, I though I may as well complete the job.)

[tastrax]

Why stop with streets Nick? There is the whole nomenclature database as well (about 34,000 records) - mountains, streams, tarns, bridges, towns....

[Son of a Beach]

Why stop with streets Nick? There is the whole nomenclature database as well (about 34,000 records) - mountains, streams, tarns, bridges, towns....

Why not indeed!

Looks like that needs search string of "%%%%", and would require a slight tweaking to my script.

However, I don't think I'll be able to geocode the results of that search to get latitude and longitude.. Never mind.

[Son of a Beach]

Well, I discovered that quite a few streets were missing from the list I initially grabbed from theLIST. I think the results I originally got were all the addresses in the database without street numbers (which turned out to be most of them - 5845 streets/roads to be precise).

So I've done a second search including "1-20" in the street number field to find all addresses with a street number from 1 to 20. This took AGES to download, and required a lot more complicated massaging once I had saved the data.

I combined this new list with my original list and then ran an updated version of my data massaging script over it to convert it to KML. My new list has 6379 streets/roads in it, which means I was missing at least 534 from my original list. I'm not sure how complete my new list is, but I'm guessing the number of missing streets is now quite small.

[Son of a Beach]

Why stop with streets Nick? There is the whole nomenclature database as well (about 34,000 records) - mountains, streams, tarns, bridges, towns....

Why not indeed!

Looks like that needs search string of "%%%%", and would require a slight tweaking to my script.

However, I don't think I'll be able to geocode the results of that search to get latitude and longitude.. Never mind.

aha... I've found that with a bit of extra effort, theLIST can be used to get the grid references for each of these results. In theory, I've then just got to convert them to WGS84 latitude/longitude, and I can create a KML file for all 34,000 items. I might look into this if I get time tomorrow.

[Son of a Beach]

Finally got this KML file imported into Bit Map on my iPhone! 31,000 locations in Tasmania indexed and mapped, including streets, mountains, lakes, public and commercial facilities.

It sure tested the limits of the iPhones memory, and made sure I improved Bit Map's memory management for KML import a LOT in order to get it to work. 3,000 entries couldn't be imported due to invalid coordinates (probably some internal code that theLIST uses, and they were almost all the same invalid coordinates).

I really need to rewrite the storage component to keep it all in a database instead of just in files.

[flatfoot]

Seems like you're streets ahead