To identify all place names in any given area, and particularly the official place names to allow for complying with the provisions of the NZGB Act 2008 when using official names on official documents/databases.

Making digital information about place names accessible, free and easy to use enables:

• the NZGB to fully comply with the intent of the NZGB Act 2008

• Government agencies to efficiently comply with the NZGB Act 2008, particularly in order to discover/use the official names for geographic features, including depiction of macrons and other diacritical marks

• the public to easily discover official and unofficial names for geographic features

Place names are widely used by the community, businesses, travellers, iwi, local authorities and central government, and are particularly important for emergency services and maritime safety. The NZGB aims to ensure:

• significant features and places are identifiable by name so people can effectively communicate information about location, and

• New Zealand’s place names preserve our heritage and culture.

Copyright 2011 Crown copyright (c)

Land Information New Zealand and the New Zealand Government.

All rights reserved

Released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International with:

Following Disclaimers:

1. This data is made available through the LINZ Data Service and is based on information contained in Land Information New Zealand’s (LINZ) ‘New Zealand Gazetteer of Official Geographic Names’, maintained by the NZGB Secretariat

2. Some data anomalies may exist in terms of completeness and accuracy. Therefore, feedback on any data anomalies found would be appreciated.

Following Attribution:

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'CC BY 4.0 Land Information New Zealand’

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‘Contains data sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed for reuse under CC BY 4.0.'

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The New Zealand Geographic Board Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa is a statutory body appointed by Government and governed by the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Act 2008. Land Information New Zealand is responsible for administering the Act.

One of the NZGB’s main purposes is to ensure the provision of, and public access to, an authoritative record of official geographic names. Under s.13 of the NZGB Act 2008, the NZGB must establish and maintain a publicly available record known as the ‘New Zealand Gazetteer of Official Geographic Names’.

At the time the NZGB Act 2008 was passed on 1 November 2008, the information needed for a Gazetteer was spread across Gazette notices dating back to the 1920s, and a number of other hard copy records. To enable the NZGB to comply with the NZGB Act 2008 and provide a Gazetteer, the essential information was collected and compiled into six Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that listed all of the official geographic names in New Zealand, but not the unofficial names.

Subsequent to the initial publication of the spreadsheet Gazetteer, the NZGB spent considerable effort correcting information captured from the Gazette notices, updating the positions of named features and adding historical information about the names. The spatial extents of many features were also defined.

The spreadsheet based provision of the Gazetteer barely achieved the minimum legal requirements as defined in the NZGB Act 2008. It also exhibited a number of critical limitations in terms of data maintenance and access to geographic name information.

In 2012/13 the Gazetteer was redesigned and moved to a relational database, and became the ‘New Zealand Gazetteer of Official Geographic Names’.

The Place Names Gazetteer dataset is extracted from the ‘New Zealand Gazetteer of Official Geographic Names’, and is maintained by the NZGB Secretariat.

The NZGB also has requirements to collect original Māori names for features, to record previous/historic names for features, and to process unofficial names that have been used on maps/charts for many years. Not all of this information is currently available in the ‘New Zealand Gazetteer of Official Geographic Names’.