SOFT LINE GEO DB

SOFT LINE Informática shares its database of Spanish territorial organization, postal codes, and geographic information

We are publishing Soft Line Geo DB on Github, the collaborative development portal. This database is an updated and maintained work from 2016 until today, based on official and public sources.

This "SOFT LINE Geo DB" is a dataset processed from public sources, updated and in MySQL database format, containing the Spanish territorial organization (autonomous communities, provinces, municipalities, counties, and other population entities), including postal codes and geographic information, with tables optimized for fast queries, minimal space usage for related records, and easy use.

Demonstrations page.

The IT company SOFT LINE uses this database in its own software to provide added value to its clients.

To make data-driven decisions, data must be consistent and as accurate as possible. When dealing with location-related data, it is astonishing how many software programs and services store this information in the worst possible manner in terms of data processing and analytics (abominations such as invented numbers for municipalities or directly the name of the “town” or municipality in each record, sometimes even free text, instead of identifiers).

With the aim of helping improve this poor situation of software and records in general, we are publishing “Soft Line Geo DB”, so that anyone who wants to “do things right” has resources available.

Among others, these are the motivations that led us to create this database:

1.            To have a relational database in which the data of Spanish provinces and municipalities are normalized, using numerical IDs compatible with official ones, and not invented numbers or “free text,” which is the easy way.

2.            To determine which official municipality a postal code belongs to and how many streets it includes.
The problem with postal codes is that they are not strictly a subdivision of municipalities: some municipalities have a single postal code, others have several, and there are also municipalities that share the same postal code.

3.            To geolocate (with latitude/longitude) municipalities and include other information, such as the island to which they belong, province, autonomous community, population count, altitude...

4.            To be able to present users with the municipalities of the ISLAND in question, instead of—as “everyone does”—mixing all municipalities from all islands just because they belong to the same province...

5.            To relate INE data and other statistical or geographic sources using consistent and compatible references (municipality ID, province ID, sometimes only the postal code is a reliable data point, etc.)

We hope it is useful.

Sample from the municipalities table: