Where the records come from.

Heritage places

The place records themselves come from open government data. For Tāmaki Makaurau that is the historic heritage schedule of the Auckland Unitary Plan, published by Auckland Council as open data. Each record carries the council’s own identifier so a place can be traced back to the schedule entry.

Source

Auckland Council Open Data — Historic Heritage Overlay Place (Auckland Unitary Plan, Schedule 14 Historic Heritage)

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)

Attribution

Contains data sourced from Auckland Council, licensed for reuse under CC BY 4.0.

Also used

Auckland Council address data (CC BY 4.0), for placing records that arrive with an address but no coordinate.

Where a record has no coordinate, it is placed by matching its street address against the council’s address layer. A match is only kept when the street and locality both agree. Places that cannot be placed precisely are left off the map rather than given an approximate pin.

The New Zealand Heritage List / Rārangi Kōrero

The List, maintained by Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga, is the national register. HeriTrail does not republish its content. Where a place we already hold from council data also appears on the List, we record the List number as a cross-reference and nothing more. Names, descriptions, categories and assessments from the List are not reproduced, because its terms require written permission for reuse and that permission has not been granted.

A formal permission request covering List entry metadata is drafted and will be sent to Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga. If it is granted, this page will say so and set out the scope.

Descriptions and facts

Written entries come from two open sources, and each block of text on a place page names which one.

Wikidata

Structured facts such as construction date, architect and style. Licence CC0; credited anyway.

Wikipedia

The opening paragraph of a matching English Wikipedia article, adapted. Licence CC BY-SA 4.0, so the article is linked and credited beside the text.

Matching is deliberately conservative: a place is linked to a Wikipedia article only when the names agree closely and the coordinates are near. A person checks uncertain matches before anything appears. Māori heritage places are never matched automatically, because Wikipedia’s coverage of pā, wāhi tapu and similar sites is often written from a colonial frame. See the cultural policy.

Where no open description exists, the field stays empty. HeriTrail does not generate descriptions, opening hours, access details, Māori names or tikanga.

Photographs

Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and are stored with their licence and attribution, which are shown beside the image wherever it appears. Licences in use are public domain, CC0, CC BY and CC BY-SA in their various versions. No photograph is kept without a recorded licence and credit.

Images are mirrored into our own storage rather than hot-linked, so a place page does not depend on Commons being reachable, and the upstream URL is kept for provenance. The full list is on the image credits page.

The archival “then” photographs for the then-and-now feature are still being sourced. Until real, licensed plates exist, the sliders on this site are labelled as previews.

Trails and narration

Trails are written from the records above and from public historical sources named in each trail’s own attribution. Each narrated chapter carries its script as a transcript. The voices in the current build are draft synthetic narration and are labelled as such in the app; they will be re-recorded with real narrators. There are 16 trails today, in Tāmaki Makaurau and Waikato.

Eateries

The cafés and restaurants shown near a place or along a trail come from Google Places, requested live for the area being viewed and never stored by us. Google’s own listing, hours and rating apply. A small curated set marks eateries that are themselves in heritage buildings; those are hand-checked against the same heritage schedule as everything else.

• Listings are refreshed on each request and cached for at most 15 minutes, as Google's terms require.
• Google has no category for New Zealand or Pacific cuisine, so that filter can only ever come from our curated set.
• A listing appearing on HeriTrail is not an endorsement, and we do not take payment for placement.

Maps

Map tiles in the app are served by Mapbox. The drawn basemap on this website is decorative; pin positions on it are derived from real coordinates, but distances should be read from the labels, not the picture.

Corrections

If a record is wrong, the fastest route is the “Report an issue” control on the place in the app. Otherwise see how to correct a record.