Commercial layers on Koordinates can now be sold with breakpoint (or tiered) pricing.

Buyers of such layers pay less per area (or feature) the more they buy.

How does it work?

The seller of a layer adds ‘breakpoints’ at which cheaper prices apply. Breakpoints are cumulative, so the total sale charge is the total of (Breakpoint 1 to Breakpoint 2) plus (Breakpoint 2 to Breakpoint 3) plus (Breakpoint 3 to Breakpoint 4), depending on which breakpoints apply.

Example

Imagine a commercial layer covering 80,000 Ha.

The seller of the layer decides on these breakpoints:

Which looks like this when the seller creates the breakpoints in Koordinates:

These breakpoints then equal the following sale quotes for some example purchase areas:

Koordinates now features enhanced search, which searches through the layer title, description, supplier, category, geotags and other relevant information.

Searching for “Auckland contours” will give you results like this:

We’re still working through some issues for certain region-based searches and hope to have them resolved soon.

Some new ways to follow Koordinates on Twitter:

• Koordinates blog posts, status updates and customer service: koordinates
• New Koordinates layers for the US: koordinatesus
• New Koordinates layers for NZ: koordinatesnz

And our personal Twitter accounts:

• Ed: edcorkery
• Rob: amatix

Koordinates has a variety of Atom feeds available for new layers. The feeds are split into categories, geographic areas and suppliers.

Some useful examples:

• All new layers – feed
• New layers for New Zealand – feed
• New layers for Ollivier & Co – feed
• New topographic layers – feed
• New layers for Land Information New Zealand – feed
• New layers for the USA – feed

You can also mix categories, geographic areas and suppliers, for example:

• New cadastral layers for New Zealand – feed
• New boundaries from Land Information New Zealand – feed

Generally every page listing layers on Koordinates has an associated feed, except for search results.

One of our server providers, Slicehost, is currently experiencing network problems which has taken parts of Koordinates offline.

Update: Back up at 12:25am.

Most of the data underlying the LINZ topographic maps of New Zealand is now available for free download as a public service provided by Koordinates Ltd:

Land Information New Zealand topographic data version 14

Certain LINZ topographic layers are only available after paying a small fee, generally because they’re very dense types of data. Two examples are the New Zealand 20m Contours and the New Zealand Spot Heights.

Many topographic layers covering the Chatham Islands are available from Ollivier & Co.

Koordinates has added some new file formats to our download file format list:

• MapInfo TAB. The default file format for Pitney Bowes MapInfo.
• CSV (Comma Separated Values). A text format commonly used by spreadsheet software.
• TIFF/GeoTIFF – a very common high-quality image format, commonly used for aerial and satellite imagery.

They join our existing formats:

• Shapefile. The most common GIS file format, originally designed by ESRI.
• DWG. A common CAD format, which supports linked imagery.
• JPEG/GeoJPEG. A common imagery format.
• KML. The Google Earth format, commonly supported by other software.
• KMZ. The compressed Google Earth format, not commonly supported by other software.

You can read an explanation of the Koordinates download system here.

Koordinates now supports large quantities of high-density vector data priced “Per Feature”. For those unfamiliar with GIS, a ‘feature’ is a line, point or polygon.

So a portion of a Koordinates layer with millions of points, polygons or polylines can now be purchased via simple pricing such as ‘1 feature for 0.1c’.

The initial type of data we aimed to support with this feature was cadastral or property data, which in New Zealand alone adds up to 2.5 million property parcels.

GIS consultancy Ollivier & Co is the first company to sell cadastral data on Koordinates. You can browse it here, or visit some of the layers directly:

• Cadastral Parcel Boundaries (Feb 09)
• Cadastral Address (Feb 09)
• Cadastral Titles (points) (Feb 09)

Ollivier & Co. have made their topographic image tiles available for purchase via Koordinates.

Topographic image (or raster) tiles are images designed to closely resemble the LINZ topographic map series, but continuous across New Zealand. There are no borders or other artifacts present at the boundaries of the map sheets.