About mapaPH
Building accessible, open-source geographic infrastructure and civic data utilities for the Philippines.
Why mapaPH Exists
Finding clean, accessible geographic and civic data in the Philippines is often far more difficult than it should be. Valuable public datasets—such as population census figures, municipal financial audits, election statistics, and transit routes—are frequently trapped inside static PDF reports, spread across fragmented departmental portals, or distributed in proprietary shapefile formats that require specialized desktop GIS software to inspect.
Furthermore, place names across Philippine public records suffer from severe orthographic inconsistency. A single municipality might be recorded as "Sto. Tomas" in one department's spreadsheet, "Santo Tomas" in a census publication, and "St. Thomas" in legacy cartographic files. Without standardized numeric identifiers, joining socio-economic data with geographical maps causes significant friction for researchers, urban planners, journalists, and civic developers.
We founded mapaPH as an independent, open-source project to solve this problem. Instead of constructing a monolithic application, we develop lightweight, specialized web tools that make Philippine spatial data accessible, interactive, and programmatically queryable.
Data Sourcing & Technical Pipeline
Our applications rely on publicly available government records, open cartographic contributions, and open-data standards. Here is how data is ingested, standardized, and presented across our ecosystem:
1. PSA Official Census Figures vs. Geometry-Computed Metrics
Official population statistics, household counts, and administrative land area figures displayed in our tools originate directly from published reports by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), such as the 2020 Census of Population and Housing (CPH).
Where spatial measurements (such as polygon land surface area or bounding box dimensions) are generated directly by our mapping engine (e.g., via Turf.js or GDAL operations), they are explicitly calculated using World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84 / EPSG:4326) geodesic projections. We carefully distinguish between PSA official declared figures and geometry-computed spatial approximations to ensure statistical accuracy.
2. PSGC-Keyed Data Joining
To eliminate string-matching errors across datasets, all administrative boundaries and data tables in mapaPH are keyed using the Philippine Standard Geographic Code (PSGC) maintained by the PSA. Every region, province, city, municipality, and barangay is assigned a unique numeric key (e.g., 9-digit or 10-digit PSGC format). This guarantees that external tabular data (such as custom CSV files uploaded by users) can be joined cleanly to boundary vector files without manual text normalization.
3. Electoral Data & Commission on Audit Metrics
Electoral records presented in visual tools like Lens are sourced from public election tallies published by the Commission on Elections (COMELEC). Municipal asset valuations and financial statements originate from public Annual Audit Reports issued by the Commission on Audit (COA).
Philippine Statutory Legal Framework & Data Compliance
All data collection, storage, and publishing activities across the mapaPH platform adhere strictly to Philippine statutory laws governing public domain materials, data privacy, and electronic transparency:
RA 8293 Section 176 (Public Domain Status)
Under Republic Act No. 8293 (Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines), Section 176 dictates that no copyright shall subsist in any work of the Government of the Philippines. Public statistics, official census records, and government cartographic boundary registries are public domain materials available for civic re-use.
RA 10173 (Data Privacy Act Compliance)
Our platform complies fully with Republic Act No. 10173 (Data Privacy Act of 2012). We do not collect, process, or store personally identifiable information (PII). All census and financial datasets handled consist exclusively of aggregated, anonymized public municipal metrics exempt under Section 4(e) for public statistical functions.
Executive Order No. 2, s. 2016 (FOI)
Data collection operationalizes the constitutional right to public information reaffirmed by Executive Order No. 2 (s. 2016) regarding Freedom of Information (FOI), ensuring public access to municipal financial audits and election returns.
RA 10175 (Cybercrime Prevention Security)
Web delivery infrastructure complies with Republic Act No. 10175 security directives. mapaPH operates as a static, immutable web architecture hosted on secure global CDNs with zero client-side database tracking.
Open-Source Philosophy & Transparency
Every line of code powering mapaPH applications, along with our boundary compilation scripts, is released under the permissive MIT License on GitHub.
By maintaining full repository transparency, developers can verify how coordinate transformations are performed, inspect raw dataset files, fork our applications, or integrate our standard GeoJSON exports into their own spatial projects.
Independent Non-Government Disclaimer
Official Notice of Independence:
mapaPH is an independent, community-driven open-source initiative created by civic tech enthusiasts. mapaPH is not affiliated with, officially endorsed by, sponsored by, or representative of the Philippine Government, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), the Commission on Elections (COMELEC), the Commission on Audit (COA), or any national or local government unit.
All official government trademarks, agency logos, and institutional references remain the property of their respective legal owners. Official statistics should always be verified against official publications at psa.gov.ph.