Macau is formed by two islands and one peninsula,
has a totally area of 21.45Km2 (Annex 1). It
is divided into 7 parishes, and for statistic
purpose, the parishes are further divided into
98 sections and 1092 subsections, each subsection
is basically a block of building(s) surround
by four rows (Annex 2). Up to the present time,
the use of maps in statistical process is only
on enumeration purpose, the Census and Statistics
Department of Macau (DSEC) maintain a set of
maps in the detail of subsection in paper form.
Most of the maps are in A4 size, some larger
subsections in A3 size.
The DSEC used to maintain the maps by its own,
a team of enumerators periodically verify the
correctness of the maps and if any changes were
found, the maps will be updated manually. Incorrectness
of maps will also be reported during survey
enumeration, in this case the suspected maps
will be verified and changes will be made accordingly.
2.
SOURCE OF MAPS IN MACAU
Limited by the size of the territory and
the small economic, there is no private company
producing maps in Macau, all maps are produced
by the Cartography and Cadastral Department
- DSCC. The major function of DSCC is to provide
cadastral and cartography related services to
the public, such as lands survey and boundary
of the territory, property registration, aerial
copies of photographs, Macau territory cartography
disks, CD-ROM etc.
Recently, a cooperation plan was started between
the two departments - DSEC and DSCC, the statistics
department provides updated information collected
from survey enumeration to the cartography department,
and the cartography department provides updated
maps to the statistics department for further
enumeration. At the moment two departments are
working together to build up the initial maps
database which will serve as the base for future
development. With this cooperation project,
DSEC is expecting to have fully digitised maps
for enumeration as well as for data dissemination
in the near future.
MicroStation is the software packaged used
in DSCC for maps production. In fact, this software
package is a general purpose engineering software
package, it can be used for plant engineering,
geoengineering, civil engineering, and mechanical
engineering, etc. In order to minimize the chaos
when the maps are received, DSEC use the same
package for its maps application.
3.
USE OF MAPS FOR ENUMERATION PURPOSE
For many years DSEC has built up a geocoding
system for identifying the location and the
household . The geocode is composed of
15 digits in the following format:
P
P
S
S
T
T
B
B
B
U
U
U
U
F
F
PP:
Parish
SS:
Section
TT:
Subsection
BBB:
Building
UUUU:
Unit
FF:
Family
With this geocoding system, each location and
family can be uniquely identified. This system
provides the base of the universe for most of
the social surveys with the target of households
or individuals, therefore, the maps for enumeration
are also built according to the structure of
the geocode, up to the level of subsections.
In DESC, all these maps for enumeration are
maintained by a department called Department
of Coordination and Integration of Statistics.
Up to the present time, these maps are still
in paper form. The user departments, like the
Department of Demographic StatisticsandDepartment of Prices and Services
Statisticsetc. keep a copy of
these maps for their own uses. Since the maps
are not centralised in an electronic form, errors
and omissions are always found in the users'
copy.
To overcome the above problem, a centralised
database of maps will be built with the digitised
maps received from the cartography department.
This database will be accessible by all the
user departments thought local network, and
some interface programs are being developed
to help the end users to retrieve the maps.
The interface programs will probably be built
on web, and will employ certain new web technologies
like the Active Server Page (ASP). The maps
database will also be linked with the geocode
table to automatically generate enumeration
maps, that means when the samples of the survey
are drawn, the system will sort the samples
according to their geocode, and print
out the maps of the subsections involved. Also,
the program will let the users to filter the
unwanted maps in order to minimize the waste.
4.
USE OF MAPS FOR DATA DISSEMINATION
Due to the very limited human resources,
Macau statistics department has not any work
done in this area. However, some software are
being tested for the dissemination of demography
data with maps support, especially on the presentation
of data on internet. We are expecting the result
of the next round population census will be
disseminated promptly on internet with certain
details of geographic information presented.
