DEV Community: Waisuan

Taiwan open data as clean JSON: new companies, laws in English, drug licenses and recalls

Waisuan — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:00:31 +0000

Taiwan publishes a lot of high-quality government data under the Open Government Data License, version 1.0, which allows commercial use with attribution. The catch: most of it ships as Chinese-headed CSV or JSON dumps, with ROC calendar dates (1150901 = 2026-09-01) and one file per month or category.

I turned four of these datasets into small Apify Actors that return clean, English-keyed JSON with ISO dates. Here is what each one is good for, with real output.

1. New company registrations (公司設立登記)

Every month the Ministry of Economic Affairs publishes the list of newly registered companies (about 3,000 a month). Useful for B2B lead lists, accounting firms, office suppliers and market research.

{
  "businessId": "24998335",
  "companyName": "凱翎國際物流有限公司",
  "approvedDate": "2026-09-11",
  "registrationMonth": "2026-09",
  "county": "桃園市",
  "district": "大園區",
  "capitalTwd": 1000000,
  "license": "Open Government Data License, version 1.0 (Taiwan)"
}

Filters: month, county, capital range and business-item keyword. Representative names are off by default.

→ Taiwan New Company Registrations

2. Laws and regulations, Chinese + English (全國法規資料庫)

The Ministry of Justice publishes every law and regulation, plus official English translations for many of them. The Actor returns one record per article, which makes it easy to feed into search or an AI agent:

{
  "lawName": "個人資料保護法",
  "lawNameEn": "Personal Data Protection Act",
  "articleNo": "第 1 條",
  "textZh": "為規範個人資料之蒐集、處理及利用，以避免人格權受侵害，並促進個人資料之合理利用，特制定本法。",
  "textEn": "The Personal Data Protection Act (the \"PDPA\") is enacted to regulate the collection, processing and use of personal data so as to prevent harm to personality rights, and to facilitate the proper use of personal data.",
  "lawModifiedDate": "2025-11-11",
  "englishModifiedDate": "2025-11-11",
  "englishMayBeOutdated": false,
  "articleUrl": "https://law.moj.gov.tw/LawClass/LawSingle.aspx?pcode=I0050021&flno=1"
}

The englishMayBeOutdated flag is set when the Chinese text was amended after the English translation, which happens more often than you would think (the Civil Code is one example).

→ Taiwan Laws & Regulations

3. Drug and medical device licenses (食藥署許可證)

The Taiwan FDA publishes every drug license (~72,000 including cancelled ones), medical device license (~105,000), health food approval and food additive registration. Search by keyword, license number or company:

{
  "licenseType": "drug",
  "licenseNumber": "內衛成製字第000141號",
  "status": "active",
  "issueDate": "1969-07-09",
  "expiryDate": "2029-06-30",
  "nameEn": "YCOLE-N COATED TABLETS",
  "dosageForm": "糖衣錠",
  "activeIngredients": ["ACETAMINOPHEN (EQ TO PARACETAMOL)", "NOSCAPINE HCL", "…"],
  "manufacturerCountry": "TW"
}

Handy for cross-border sellers and compliance checks: "is this product actually licensed in Taiwan?"

→ Taiwan FDA License Lookup

4. Product recall monitor (食品藥品醫材回收)

Five Taiwan FDA feeds in one schema: domestic drug recalls, medical device safety alerts, rejected food imports at the border, and the FDA's curated international food recalls and drug alerts (including Japanese recalls with links to the original notice). Every record has a stable id, so you can run it on a schedule and only act on new items.

{
  "id": "tw-food-343709e3031edde8",
  "country": "TW",
  "category": "food",
  "recordType": "borderRejection",
  "publishedDate": "2026-10-13",
  "productName": "白蘿蔔",
  "reason": "農藥殘留含量不符規定",
  "reasonDetail": "檢出殘留農藥芬普尼0.002 ppm",
  "originCountry": "中國大陸",
  "hsCode": "0706.90.00.10-6"
}

→ APAC Product Recall Monitor

Doing it yourself

All of these sources are public. If you prefer to build it yourself, start at data.gov.tw and the Taiwan FDA open data portal, and remember two things:

Convert ROC dates: ROC year + 1911 = Gregorian year.
Attribution is mandatory under the license. Each record from these Actors carries source and license fields for that reason.

Please be gentle with government servers: one request at a time, with a delay.

Disclosure: the Actors and this article were written with the help of AI. The field mappings and examples come from real runs against the official sources.

How to get Taiwan's official property transaction prices as clean JSON

Waisuan — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 07:03:03 +0000

Taiwan publishes every property sale, presale and rental transaction through the Ministry of the Interior's Real Estate Actual Price Registration (實價登錄) open data. It is one of the best official property datasets in Asia: transaction date, total price, unit price, floor, building type, area, parking, even notes like "sold between relatives".

It is also awkward to use if you don't read Chinese:

Column names are in Chinese (總價元, 建物移轉總面積平方公尺, …).
Dates use the ROC calendar: 1150807 means 2026-08-07.
Areas are in square metres, but Taiwanese buyers think in ping (坪, about 3.306 m²).
The official unit price includes the parking space, which makes many listings look cheaper or pricier per ping than they really are.
Data is split into one CSV per county, per transaction type, per quarter.

The quick way

I packaged the cleanup into an Apify Actor: Taiwan Real Estate Price Registration (實價登錄).

Input:

{
  "seasons": ["115S3"],
  "counties": ["E"],
  "transactionTypes": ["sale"],
  "districts": ["左營區"],
  "buildingTypeContains": "住宅大樓",
  "excludeSpecialRelations": true,
  "maxItems": 100
}

Output (one real record, Kaohsiung, Q3 2026):

{
  "transactionDate": "2026-08-07",
  "county": "高雄市",
  "district": "左營區",
  "address": "高雄市左營區啟文路",
  "buildingType": "住宅大樓(11層含以上有電梯)",
  "floor": "十二層",
  "rooms": 2,
  "buildingAreaPing": 43.78,
  "totalPriceTwd": 16550000,
  "parkingPriceTwd": 2150000,
  "unitPriceTwdPerPingExclParking": 397988,
  "note": "含裝潢費；"
}

What it does for you:

English field names and ISO dates
Area in ping as well as m²
Price per ping with the parking space removed
Filters: district, building type, price range, date range
Drops related-party deals (relatives, employees, co-owners) by default, since they distort averages
Several quarters and counties in one run; leave seasons empty for the latest published quarter
Addresses are cut at road/section level by default for privacy

Pricing is pay-per-result: US$1.50 per 1,000 records.

Doing it yourself

If you'd rather build it yourself, the raw files are here: https://plvr.land.moi.gov.tw/DownloadSeason?season=115S3&fileName=A_lvr_land_A.csv

season: ROC year + S + quarter (115S3 = 2026 Q3)
A_lvr_land_A: first letter is the county (A = Taipei, E = Kaohsiung, F = New Taipei…), last letter is the type (A = sale, B = presale, C = rental)
Row 1 is the Chinese header, row 2 an English header; data starts on row 3
An unpublished quarter returns a small HTML page instead of a CSV

Please be gentle with the government server: download one file at a time with a delay.

License

The data is published under the Open Government Data License, Taiwan, version 1.0, which allows commercial use. Attribution is required: 資料來源：內政部不動產交易實價查詢服務網 (Source: Ministry of the Interior, Real Estate Actual Price Registration).

Disclosure: this article and the Actor were written with the help of AI. The data, field mappings and example record come from real runs against the official source.