Free Philippine GIS & GeoJSON Data Directory
A technical directory for finding, processing, and standardizing free administrative boundaries, natural hazard layers, and demographic spatial data in the Philippines.
1. The Open Spatial Data Landscape in the Philippines
Data scientists, urban planners, cartographers, and journalists frequently encounter fragmented boundaries when working on Philippine projects. While public disclosure mandates such as Executive Order No. 2, series of 2016 (Freedom of Information) and the Philippine Geomatics Act require open public data, actual distribution remains distributed across separate agency websites, academic clearinghouses, and international humanitarian repositories.
This directory catalogs primary open spatial data sources in the Philippines, evaluating each for boundary precision, update frequency, coordinate projections, and practical workflows for QGIS and web application development.
2. Official Government Portals and Repositories
NAMRIA (National Mapping and Resource Information Authority)
Statutory AuthorityPortal: geoportal.gov.ph (Philippine Geoportal)
NAMRIA is the central mapping agency under the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). The Philippine Geoportal hosts base topographic maps, nautical bathymetric charts, national road networks, administrative boundaries, and active fault line overlays.
Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA)
Census & PSGCPortals: psa.gov.ph and openstat.psa.gov.ph
The PSA maintains the Philippine Standard Geographic Code masterlist and publishes official population figures from the 2015, 2020, and 2024 census cycles. OpenSTAT provides tabular time-series indicators for municipal agriculture, local consumer price indexes, labor participation, and poverty thresholds.
DOST-PHIVOLCS & GeoRiskPH (HazardHunterPH)
Geological HazardsPortal: hazardhunter.georisk.gov.ph
Developed by DOST-PHIVOLCS, GeoRiskPH serves multi-hazard spatial data. The platform provides spatial layers for active fault lines (Valley Fault System, Philippine Fault Zone), earthquake-induced liquefaction susceptibility, volcanic pyroclastic density current zones, and tsunami inundation models.
3. Community and Global Open-Data Archives
OpenStreetMap Philippines & Geofabrik Extracts
ODbL LicensePortal: download.geofabrik.de/asia/philippines.html
Geofabrik compiles daily spatial extracts of the entire Philippine OpenStreetMap database. The dataset includes road networks, waterways, health facilities, transit stations, and building footprints contributed by local volunteer cartographers.
UN OCHA Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX COD-AB)
Disaster ResponsePortal: data.humdata.org (Philippines Administrative Boundaries)
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) maintains the Common Operational Datasets for Administrative Boundaries (COD-AB). The dataset contains vetted national, regional, provincial, municipal, and barangay polygons standardized with P-codes and PSGC cross-references.
PhilGIS (Philippine GIS Data Clearinghouse)
Community ArchivePortal: philgis.org
A community repository providing administrative limits, watershed extents, soil classifications, and climate types across the Philippine archipelago.
4. Checklist for Evaluating Philippine GIS Boundary Files
Before deploying downloaded spatial files to production web services or publication maps, verify the following four structural requirements:
- Territorial Jurisdictions & Supreme Court Rulings: Verify whether boundaries reflect current legal determinations, particularly the Supreme Court ruling in Taguig vs Makati (G.R. No. 235316), the split of Maguindanao into del Norte and del Sur under RA 11550, and the creation of the 8 SGA municipalities in BARMM under BAA Nos. 41 to 48.
- Island Topology & Geometry Repair: The Philippine archipelago includes over 7,641 islands. Shapefiles digitized from low-resolution scans often contain self-intersecting polygon rings, unclosed line strings, or micro-islands that trigger rendering errors in MapLibre and Leaflet.
- Coordinate System Transformations: Ensure layers are explicitly converted to WGS84 (EPSG:4326) for GeoJSON export or Web Mercator (EPSG:3857) for tile caches. Leaving a shapefile in PRS92 (EPSG:3123) will displace coordinates hundreds of meters southwest on global basemaps.
- Join Key Integrity: Join demographic statistics exclusively using 9-digit or 10-digit PSGC numeric keys. Text joins on municipality names fail due to spelling variations (for example, "Poblacion 1" versus "Poblacion I", or "City of San Fernando, La Union" versus "City of San Fernando, Pampanga").
5. CLI Data Pipeline: Converting and Optimizing Philippine Shapefiles
Most raw shapefiles downloaded from NAMRIA or PhilGIS arrive in projected PRS92 coordinates and contain heavy vertex counts. The pipeline below demonstrates how to convert, repair, and compress spatial files using GDAL and Mapshaper:
ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON \ -s_srs EPSG:3123 \ -t_srs EPSG:4326 \ -lco RFC7946=YES \ -lco COORDINATE_PRECISION=6 \ ph_municipalities_wgs84.geojson \ namria_prs92_raw.shp
# Fix invalid polygon geometries, simplify coastal vertices, and build shared arcs mapshaper ph_municipalities_wgs84.geojson \ -clean \ -filter-islands min-area=50000m2 \ -simplify dp 12% keep-shapes \ -o format=topojson \ quantization=10000 \ ph_municipalities_web.topojson