I'm primarily looking for a GIS data source for postal codes in Japan as well as census data for different scales of geography. Has anyone found a good source of these data sets that is in English?
[GIS] Japan Data: Postcode/Census
censusdatajapanpostal-code
Related Solutions
check this link http://www.geohive.com/cntry/ecuador.aspx for the census data (1990,2001 and 2010)
this one http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/metadata.show?id=1174&currTab=simple for the admin limits
By the way it is better to add the info that you are looking for the admin regions called "Parishes". These are third-level administrative units of Ecuador (also known as municipalities in other countries).
Things have changed since 2015 I guess, currently there are multiple free methods to obtain data and geometry of postal codes. It is unfortunately slightly harder to find when one cannot read Dutch.
I've summarized the different ways of obtaining postal code data of The Netherlands below, the methods may lead to the same data.
- On the page "Kerncijfers per postcode" ("Key postal code figures") of the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) you can find recent (2018-2020) demographic data in a shapefile on a PC4 level1.
The same page has older (2008-2017) data on a PC5 and PC6 level. - PDOK provides geographic data in The Netherlands. Amongst other things they have a WFS and WMS feed for the same CBS PC4 and PC6 data.
Note that the PDOK services are limited to 1000 records per call. If you want to retrieve all data, you need to use paging, by appending this parameter:
&startindex={starting at this 0-based index}PDOK has a QGIS plugin allowing you to easily add the postal code data in QGIS as a layer, without manually downloading the shapefile.
To retrieve the number of residents per PC4 zone in 2017 you could use the following URL parameters:
https://geodata.nationaalgeoregister.nl/cbspostcode4/wfs?request=GetFeature&service=WFS&version=2.0.0&typeName=postcode42017&propertyName=(postcode,aantal_inwoners)&outputFormat=json
1. PC4 indicates that only the first four characters of the postal code are used as a key, e.g. if the full postal code is 1011AA, the data aggregates information for all postal codes starting with 1011.
Similarly PC5 refers to the first 5 characters (e.g. all postal codes starting with 1011A). PC6 is equal to the full postal code.
Best Answer
Not sure if this is what you had in mind, but there is a CSV file available from the Japan Post web site that has postcodes and their corresponding locations in Romaji (roman characters or English if you wish to think of it in those terms) for all of Japan. It is available from a link on this page: http://www.post.japanpost.jp/zipcode/dl/roman-zip.html There is no equivalent English page (that I could find), but if you can identify the kanji '全国一括' (also identifiable by size:(988,276Byte)) it's in the lower right corner of the group of links (the data is provided by prefecture (ken) as well, thus the large number of links), and the file is zipped as: KEN_ALL_ROME.LZH
There are some other attributes included in the file (not LAT/LONG), but I did not research what they are.
If this is enough as is, or not what you wanted, that's fine. However, if you are interested in knowing more about the data set, I may be willing to put a little more effort into looking into it, if asked.
At this point, I am not sure about Census data sets. Sorry.
HTH