Statbel publishes today as open data the update of the regions’ consolidated address file with the integration of the statistical sectors for the year 2024.
The address registers are available as open data on the official websites of each region:
- For Flanders, the official source is the Register of buildings and addresses. This register gathers all basic information on the buildings and addresses on the Flemish territory (street names, addresses, buildings and construction units).
- In the Walloon Region, the ICAR project (Centralised Inventory of Addresses and Streets) is the Walloon regional address register. In addition to its contribution to BeSt Address, this project is also in line with the European INSPIRE directive, which recommends setting up registers of people, addresses and buildings.
- The UrbIS - Adresses product corresponds to the dataset of Brussels addresses. This dataset is not compliant with BeSt specifications, it is generated by integrating address data supplied by the municipalities and is produced directly by the CIRB-CIBG (Brussels Regional Informatics Centre).
This 2024 update combines these three registers into a consolidated file and links them to the statistical sectors for the current year. This file is available in txt, sqlite and csv formats. The file is designed to be easily imported into Geographic Information System (GIS) software using the X-Y coordinates.
The statistical sector is the most detailed territorial level used by Statbel in its statistics and publications. The outlines of these sectors are also available on our open data portal.
A few more details on the format of the txt file:
- File’s name: txt
- The encoding is utf-8
- The column separator is the | (pipe) character
- In decimal numbers, the point (not the comma) is used to separate the integer part of the number from the decimal part.
- The columns that make up the file are described in a small metadata file attached to the file.