About the atlas

The Places of Worship Atlas records 1,392 places of worship in Aotearoa New Zealand, from 32 historical directories, phonebooks and books (see Sources). Each place has a profile bringing together every source that mentions it.

PoWcodes

Every place has a permanent identifier such as NZ-CAN-4M7QXK: the country, the ISO 3166-2 region (or ZZZ where there is none), five random characters and a check character. A code never changes or is reused. If two records turn out to be the same place, or a region is corrected, the old code forwards to the current one.

Status

• active: listed in a directory or phonebook from 2018 on, or reported active by web research.
• closed, demolished, converted, relocated: a source or web research says so; the latest dated event wins.
• unknown: the sources do not say. A place is never assumed closed just because it stops appearing.

This release: 666 active, 136 closed, 102 converted, 153 demolished, 67 relocated, 268 unknown.

How the data were made

Source pages were transcribed and place records extracted with language models, then normalised and linked across sources, with linkage decisions partly reviewed by hand. Locations come from LINZ addresses, the NZ Gazetteer, OpenStreetMap and model inference, checked against the stated locality. Web research added current status, dates and addresses; findings that conflicted with the sources were reviewed before being applied. Profile summaries are written by a language model from the facts only.

Errors remain. Each profile shows its sources, the precision of its location, and any disagreements between sources.

Data and licence

The data are available under the Open Database License (ODbL 1.0); individual contents under the Database Contents License (DbCL 1.0).

• pow-places.csv: one row per place
• pow-places.jsonl: full profiles
• pow-places.geojson: located places
• sources.csv: the sources
• data-dictionary.md: field definitions
• CITATION.cff: how to cite the dataset

Contains data sourced from the LINZ Data Service licensed for reuse under CC BY 4.0. Contains information from OpenStreetMap, which is made available under the Open Database License (ODbL), © OpenStreetMap contributors. Source titles are listed in sources.csv. Base map: Protomaps, from OpenStreetMap data.