Free Philippine Administrative Boundaries shapefile

Free Administrative Boundary shapefile can be downloaded here.

The coordinate reference system is latitude/longitude and theWGS84 datum.


Other file formats such as ESRI geodatabase (.gdb), Google Earth (.kmz), and RData for RProject.
Geospatial data from other countries are also available for download here.

File Formats

A "shapefile" consist of at least three actual files. This is a commonly used format that can be directly used in Arc-anything, DIVA-GIS, and many other programs. Unfortunately, non-latin characters are garbled.

An "ESRI geodatabase" is an MS Access fole that can be opened in ArcGIS (an expensive but powerful program). One of its advantages, compared to a shapefile, is that it can store non-latin characters (e.g. Cyrillic and Chinese characters).

A "Google Earth .kmz" file can be opened in Google Earth.

A "RData" file can be used in R (with the sp package loaded)

Some files have been compressed and grouped in ZIP files. You can use programs such as 7-zip, PKZIP or StuffIt to decompress the files.