New Zealand Topographic Data Dictionary

Version 5.2

NZTopo is a database of the digital vector topographic data held by LINZ. It is maintained primarily to provide the source data for 1:50,000 scale mapping of New Zealand, its offshore islands and areas of interest in the South pacific and Ross Sea Region of Antarctica.

From this page you can access descriptions of the object classes used in the NZTopo topographic database using the object class index, or through the entity class index.

Please read the documentation guide PDF format for information on the NZTopo data structure.

For changes made to this version of the Data Dictionary review Schedule of Changes.

This data is published in two formats.

LSLIFF format. This format uses numeric codes to identify object classes and attributes. The codes are detailed for each object class in this index. You can download comma separated files (CSV) of object class codes and attribute codes.

ESRI Shapefile format. This format is used by many GIS systems. For each object class the shapefile format provides a shapefile containing the geometry (points, lines, or polygons) of the features, and a database file containing the attribute data. The name of the shapefile and of the associated attributes are listed for each object class in this data dictionary.