How we handle school district data
For the national dataset "National Land Numerical Information (Elementary/Junior High School Districts)" published by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT), the licence terms are determined individually by each municipality, and MLIT publishes a per-municipality list of these terms. A separate list is provided for each edition of the data, and the terms do not carry over between editions. We refer to the list corresponding to the edition of the data we use, ingest it as a machine-readable ledger, and operate as follows.
- We ingest and display only the data of municipalities that permit commercial use.
- For municipalities that do not permit commercial use, we neither acquire nor store the data. It does not exist in our database.
- Only where such a municipality itself publishes open data (e.g. under CC BY) do we obtain it separately under those terms and display the required attribution.
- Municipalities for which no source data exists in the national dataset (e.g. not yet compiled) are shown as blank / unmapped.
- For municipalities that require their terms to be stated, we display the relevant wording in the map popup.
Update frequency
We re-verify the licence list once a year (in principle before the annual update of the national dataset) and revise our ingestion scope if the terms have changed. When the edition of the data changes, we re-check the list corresponding to that edition. When a municipality newly publishes open data, we check its publication status monthly and reflect it in due course.
A note on accuracy
Other data
For data other than school districts, we likewise verify attribution requirements and whether commercial use and redistribution are permitted before adoption. A list of the data we use is available on the Data Sources page. We do not use data whose licence terms we have been unable to confirm.
Requests to remove or correct content
If you are a municipal officer and wish to have content removed or corrected, please contact us via our inquiry desk. Upon receiving your request, we will review it and respond promptly.