Matching Nepal's Political features with GMM features

Short URL to this page: http://goo.gl/96Q38

After you have marked any type of feature in GMM, have you noticed when GMM gives a wrong address (Sub-Locality, Locality, City) ?

For mapping Nepal, I would like to propose following method to match Nepal's Political features with GMM's features. Though majority of political features of Kathmandu Valley are mapped according to the same method as proposed below, I am listing here for those who will be drawing/editing political features of Nepal.

GMM has 7 categories to map Political boundaries.

(0) Country - Already drawn

(1) State - We have now all the Anchal (Zones) borders drawn as states and the names show up in map along the state boarders they show up in address attribute.(Nepal has total 14 Anchals)

(2) Minor Civil Divisions - In this category, We have drawn 'Development Regions' (बिकाश क्षेत्र ) (Nepal has total 5 Development Regions)

* GMM doesn't show Minor Civil Division in address attributes.

(3) District/county - All the Districts have already been drawn and now show up in address attribute - It would be great if any of you can find the more accurate GIS-shapes of the Districts and correct them accordingly for better outcome in mapping. (Within 14 Anchal/Zones, there are total of 75 districts)

(4) City / Town / Village - We'll use this to draw Metropolitan cities, Municipalities, Villages and Village Development Committees (VDCs).

e.g. Kathmandu Metropolitan City (Kathmandu 'City'), Manma Village Development Committee

(5) Locality - We use this category to mark some big settlements which come within 'City/Town/Village' e.g. 'Jawalakhel' of Lalitpur (City/Town/Village), 'Trishuli Bazar' of Bidur Municipality(City/Town/Village) 'Mugling Bazar' of 'Darechowk Village' etc.

(6) Sub-Locality / Neighborhood - We'll use this category to mark small political settlements (GMM category having specific numbers of population) which may come within City/Town/Village and or 'Locality'. e.g. 'Bhanimandal' of Jawalakhel (locality) and Lalitpur (City/Town/Village) ; Bistachhap of Bisankhunarayan(City/Town/Village); Paudi of Sundarbazar(City/Town/Village) etc.

Here's some info on number of political regions in Nepal:

Source: http://www.un.org.np/reports/maps/npcgis/NatBio00004.jpg

Why ?

We are drawing Metropolitan cities, Municipalities and Village Development Comittees (VDCs) as GMM City / Town / Village, because each of these political features have place in naming the address of a place. And all three features fall directly below district in address and in GMM hierarchy too.

So you are going to add/edit the political regions ?

One thing you must remember is that unlike other features, political features are interconnected features - neighboring political features will have at least one common boundary. e.g. East-side boundary of one feature will be west-side boundary for a feature on eastern side of the first one.

Click on 'Browse' tool, by default search shows 'any' features, type/select 'Locality'. Now you should see several bubbles on the map showing localities visible on the map. After you add/edit one locality, verify that the boundaries of surrounding localities are updated as well.

Updates:

Around September 2009 a mapper with GIS vector maps drew all Regions and Anchals.

What he did was assigned Regions as (1) State, Anchals(Zones) as (2) District and in doing so also changed few actual 'Districts' (Kathmandu, Lalitpur, Bhaktapur and Kavre) which I had manually drawn into "Minor Civil Divisions". You must have known that "Minor Civil Divisions" don't show up (States, Districts and Cities are drawn with with white dash lines) on the map.

The Consequences:

Name set for State, District, City, Locality, Sub-Locality are used to generate Full Address.

So as an example of full address shows up as:

Hakabahal, Mangal Bazaar, Patan, Bagmati, Central Region, Nepal

Location info

Notice that "Lalitpur district" is not seen in the address generated whereas "Central Region" which is not used in regular address is seen between Bagmati and Nepal.

To rectify this, I am going to tell this info with the same mapper as well as ask if he could plot the Districts too. What I am going to propose is:

After completion, the above example would result in the "Address" as Hakabahal, Mangal Bazaar, Patan, Lalitpur, Bagmati, Nepal

Group pointer URL https://groups.google.com/group/mapping-nepal/browse_thread/thread/1119a9af35d3f739?hl=en

Initial creation date: 26-apr-2009 https://groups.google.com/group/mapping-nepal/web/smatching-nepals-political-features-with-gmm-features?hl=en

Last updated: 03-apr-2011