Shapefile of Malaysia Postal codes?

Question

I am currently doing a project regarding a Choropleth map and I need data sets containing postal codes of Malaysia in a shapefile for map making purposes.

I have already gone through these sources without success:

• http://www.geopostcodes.com/Malaysia (Spatial Points Data frame, not Polygons)
• http://www.mapcruzin.com/free-malaysia-country-city-place-gis-shapefiles.htm (does not have shp files that contain postal codes)
• http://www.zipboundary.com/international.html
• http://gadm.org/country (Good resources but still do not have shp files that contain postal codes)

Does anyone know of a data repository that might have a shapefile of Malaysia's postal codes?

Answer 1

There is no direct source for this information that would be open data.

The Global Open Data Index says that the:

From the Department of Statistics Malaysia official portal, there datasets are not available. Given that the institution is in the Federal State territory, submitting for Freedom of Information request is impossible because there is no Freedom of Information Act for the Federal State Wilayah Persekutuan.

I am not fluent in Malaysian, but you have a hope in the MyGDI Data Explorer.

Finally, you could replicate the map below, found on Wikipedia's Postal codes in Malaysia. The map suggests chatting with GfK's Regiograph division as they have the data available for purchase.

Answer 2

If you find a good boundaries file of Malaysian municipalities, you could create yourself the Postal codes SHP. For example, using the Geonames API*. I made an attempt with Open Refine (tuto here) based on a KML found on GADM.

Here are the results.

31 districts names out of 144 have not been matched, but those postal codes can be added manually in an hour. Once done, you can export the Fusion table sheet to KML and retransform it into SHP using QGis.

I hope this help.

• example of geonames API request : Http://api.geonames.org/postalCodeSearch?placename=Alor+Setar&maxRows=10&country=MY&username=demo (if it doesn't work, replace demo with a real username)