List of all the islands of the Maldives

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Update 19-Jul-2013

Some errors were found in the islands list and were fixed. Please beware the island registration numbers might not be accurate.

[/note] For a recent project I needed a list of all islands of the Maldives. Initially I just wanted a list of only the inhabited islands, but later decided to expand this to include all islands whether its uninhabited, a resort or even industrial islands

My first stop was this Wikipedia page which listed all the Administrative divisions of the Maldives. From here I was able to get the information about all the atolls. Next was another Wikipedia page which had a list of all the islands of the Maldives. However this list didn’t have information such as the coordinates of the islands or the registration number of inhabited islands.

Instead of relying on Wikipedia I turned to www.isles.egov.mv , which was supposed to be the official source of information on all the islands of the Maldives. I ran php script targeting this website and was able to retrieve the records for a total of 1048 islands. The information included the island name, island type, latitude and the longitude. However it was still missing the registration numbers of inhabited islands. Also the coordinates of some islands were missing.

To find the registration numbers of the inhabited islands I turned to Maldives Post’s Post Code Finder since I knew the post codes for the islands were made up of the island registration number as the 3rd and 4th digits. Since manually searching for each island on their online search page was gonna be a pain, I downloaded their Desktop Post Code Finder and directly retrieved the information from their database. Unfortunately the information was a bit dated since it was created in 2004 and the records for some newly  inhabited islands such as R. Dhuvaafaru, Lh. Felivaru and merged islands such as S. Hulhumeedhoo and GDh. Faresmaathodaa were missing.

Since now I had the registration numbers now I needed to find the missing coordinates for some of the islands from isle.egov.mv. For this I utilized a number of tools including Google Maps,  a Map from Department of National Planning and a more detailed vector map that I got on my hands a few years back. Using all these sources I was able to reduce the number of islands that had their coordinates missing, from about 200+ to 70. The remaining islands were those which I wasn’t able to pinpoint on any of these maps.

After the finding the missing coordinates I needed to update the information about the resort islands in the list since it was a bit dated and the some knew resorts were missing.  For this I used Ministry of Tourism’s 2013 Yearbook.

After combining all these data the final result is given below. Beware that some few islands might be missing and there may be some slight errors. If you do find any error please let me know via comments or email. Hope its useful for you in some way.

The atoll data are arranged with the columns:

• Atoll registration number
• English atoll name abbreviation
• Dhivehi atoll name abbreviation
• Dhivehi atoll name abbreviation in latin alphabet
• Official atoll name in latin
• Official atoll name in Thaana

The islands data are arranged with the columns:

• isles.egov.mv id
• Atoll registration number
• Island registration number (for inhabited islands only)
• Island name in latin
• Island name in Thaana
• Island type, resort name in English (only for resort islands)
• Resort name in Thaana (only for resort islands)
• Longitude (in decimal)
• Latitude (in decimal)

Both the files are tab delimited text files and can be imported into any spreadsheet or database program.

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