Recently I noticed that the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) does an okay job of publishing their datasets openly and freely online. This is notable because not all authorities in the Philippines are able to achieve this level of straight-forward openness. You could even say it’s quite impressive!

Quick links for the impatient:

Among their online publications there are several reasonable articles discussing the data that came out of the 2015 census. According to their reports there were 225 people per sq/km in 2000 which has risen to a staggering 337 people sq/km in 2015. Those sums work out to a (linear) 2.73% population growth year on year, so it’s little wonder the economy is growing so quickly here.

The reports also links to a MS Excel spreadsheet 2015 Population Density_web.xlsx with population data per City/Municipality. Unfortunately the spreadsheet is not well arranged to make easy use of the data (multiple values in single cells etc). Because I wanted to augment this data with other data I needed to spend a fair bit of time manually massaging their dataset into single columns and then wrangling it into a nice clean JSON formatted structure that could more easily be used to combine with other datasets.

Using the Google Maps Geocoding API service it is possible to easily lookup the lat/long coordinates for each City/Municipality name listed in the census dataset which then is easy to fold back into the JSON formatted data. See insertgeocode.py for more detail.

The resulting mashed together data of the PSA 2015 Census data and the Google Maps Geocode data is now a lot more useful and allows us to create things like an interactive heatmap.

The code and datasets for this can all be found on my Github, here:

Also worth a mention is the Philippine Statistics Authority Openstat facility with plenty of useful stats and data about the Philippines: