Is there a free downloadable administrative division database of Germany?

Question

Is there downloadable and freely available database with administrative units of Germany (lands, cities, and if available, streets with zip codes)?

In many countries such databases are provided freely by central statistical offices, but for example, in case of Poland, without zip codes.

Answer 1

Here is German Open Data portal for geodata - http://www.geodatenzentrum.de/geodaten/gdz_rahmen.gdz_div?gdz_spr=eng&gdz_akt_zeile=5&gdz_anz_zeile=0&gdz_user_id=0

It has administrative areas, zipcodes and geo names (cities, points of interests), etc available for download (Shapefiles) and as webservices (WMS).

Specifically German addresses data is not available, though.

Also, you can find zipcodes/admin areas on Wikipedia or DBpedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes_in_Germany http://dbpedia.org/page/List_of_postal_codes_in_Germany

Answer 2

Here you can find some http://schnipsel.dianacht.de/2010/07/15/shapefiles-fuer-bundeslaender-und-kantone

Also as part of the global administrative borders service you can find some. http://www.gadm.org/

In both cases I don't know the depth of it.

If this is not good enough, maybe openstreetmap has more data for you. Look for this at geofabrik http://www.geofabrik.de/data/shapefiles.html

Answer 3

Germany is one of the best mapped countries in Open Street Maps. You could extract the administrative boundaries from OSM. Using Osmosis, you might do something like

osmosis --read-xml germany.osm --way-key-value keyValueList="boundary.administrative" --used-node --write-xml germany_admin.osm

Answer 4

Natural Earth has public-domain shapefiles for some of those types of geographies, but they're not as in-depth as the country-specific sources others have mentioned. They still might be worth a look, though, depending on your application: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/

Answer 5

The US NGA/GNS Server contains geographic datasets for every country in the world. It does not contain shapefiles, but does have area centroids for at least:

1. Administrative Divisions
2. Capitals (both country and administrative divisions).
3. Incorporated Cities
4. Other Populated Localities.

http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/namefiles.htm

Answer 6

The GADM Database of Global Administrative Areas attempts to capture all the administrative areas of all countries at all levels. You download all the data for an entire country. The adminstrative units don't go down to zipcodes for Germany.

While the license is not the most liberal, it is free for academic or noncommercial use.

Answer 7

Zipcode shapefiles for Germany are available here, however the data is from 1999.