The IBGE releases today, July 14, 2016, in its website, the Address Face Base of the 2010 Population Census, comprising all the 5,570 Brazilian municipalities. The base includes digital vector files that show, for instance, the length between blocks of a street, square, etc. Open geo-processing software like TerraView and Quantum Gis, among others, are needed to access the base. Click here to see every information available and download the files of the Address Face Base.

The Address Face Base of the 2010 Population Census provides the society with a base of addresses – streets, avenues, squares, parks, etc. –, segmented into blocks and in line with the enumeration areas used to collect the data for the 2010 Population Census. These areas are the smallest territorial units established by the IBGE for the purpose of collecting data for the Census. This base can be used in Geographic Information Systems, allowing geographic and spatial analysis.

This product is based on the digital census mapping, which integrates the urban and rural cartographic bases and the National Address List for Statistical Purposes - CNEFE, all of them updated during the last population census in 2010. The census mapping is a set of maps and registers that represent the national territory in its multiple subdivisions. This includes the municipalities and their urban and rural areas, districts, settlements, special areas –  conservation units, Indian lands, etc. – and public addresses.

The vector address bases came from existing products for every urban enumeration area of the Brazilian municipalities, either processed by the IBGE teams or hired from private companies, as well as those obtained from agreements with municipal administrations, all of them with unrestricted use and dissemination of derived products. Every base was submitted to technical processes of integration and checking, producing a single product for the whole country. Nonetheless, important technical limitations still exist as to the positioning and naming of addresses, which are described in the methodological note enclosed in the product[1].

Even limited, this base can be a tool to describe the urban space of a great number of municipalities that do not count with digital cartographic bases. It can also be a starting point for future updates of those interested, supplying the need of a vector layer of addresses encompassing the whole national territory.

[1] All the observations related to the quality of the data mentioned in this document are known to the IBGE, though the Institute is not responsible for correcting either these flaws or others eventually existing. Users should be aware of these observations when using this database, being responsible for deciding to use the data as they are available.