Bosnia and Herzegovina (BA) — internal licensing notes

Current state, verified directly (2026-09-17)

• Live main-bucket file (https://postal.datahub.io/ba/ba.csv): HTTP 200, content-length: 158 — header row only, 13-column schema, zero data rows. Confirmed byte-for-byte via curl -I and a direct fetch, matching what datasets/ba/datapackage.yml already declares (data_available: false).
• datasets/ba/README.md states plainly no BA postal data is available yet.
• This pass is research only — no build, no R2/git/datapackage.yml change.

Country structure — genuinely unusual, verified on Wikipedia

ISO 3166-2:BA currently defines exactly 3 top-level subdivisions, not provinces in the usual sense:

• BA-BIH — Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina)
• BA-SRP — Republika Srpska
• BA-BRC — Brčko Distrikt (Brčko District — condominium of both entities, self-governing)

Important for any future build: codes for the Federation's 10 cantons (BA-01 … BA-10) existed in ISO 3166-2:BA but were deleted from the standard on 2015-11-27. There is currently no ISO code at canton granularity. Since the cantons are the administratively meaningful tier inside the Federation (and postal-code prefixes correlate with them far better than with the single BA-BIH bucket), a future build has to decide between: (a) admin_code1 = the 3-unit ISO code only, with canton as an unofficial admin_name2-tier value, or (b) reviving the withdrawn canton codes as a custom: (non-ISO) scheme, clearly labelled as such. Do not silently resurrect BA-01..BA-10 and present them as current ISO codes.

Postal system — real, active, and split three ways for post-war

political reasons

Bosnia does have a genuine active 5-digit postal-code system (originally assigned to the SR Bosnia and Herzegovina under Yugoslavia, ranges 7xxxx/ 8xxxx), but there is no single national postal operator. Three separate companies each run their own network over their own territory, a direct consequence of the Dayton-era entity/canton structure:

1. BH Pošta (Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosniak-majority

areas)

• Official site posta.ba is reachable, but its TLS chain is broken — WebFetch failed with "unable to verify the first certificate"; a plain curl -k (skip verification) succeeds, HTTP 200. Treat this as a technical hygiene issue on their end, not a block.
• Found and fetched one genuine official document: posta.ba/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/postnet-spisak.pdf — "SPISAK POŠTA - POSTNET", 6 pages, extracted with pdftotext. It is real and structured (post office number, postal code, place, street, opština), but it is a PostNet express/parcel pickup-point list, not the full national postal-code register — only ~105 rows total, grouped under 6 regional centres (CP Sarajevo, two unlabelled CP sections, CP Travnik, CP Mostar, CP Goražde). It does not cover the full range of BH Pošta post offices/settlements the way the Wikipedia lists do.
• No bulk postal-code download, open-data page, or CSV/Excel export was found on posta.ba itself (checked the site's landing pages via search + WebFetch; none surfaced). Contrast with Croatia's own postal operator (posta.hr), which does publish an official Excel/CKAN download of its post offices — BH Pošta has no equivalent as far as this pass found.

2. Pošte Srpske (Republika Srpska)

• Official site postesrpske.com reachable (HTTP 200, valid TLS).
• No postal-code search tool, list, or open-data download found anywhere on the site or its navigation (checked the contact page and searched directly for "poštanski brojevi" + the domain). The site's public surface is oriented around parcel tracking and office locations, not a postal-code register.

3. HP Mostar (Hrvatska pošta Mostar — Croat-majority cantons)

• Official site post.ba (note: different domain from BH Pošta's posta.ba). Has a page post.ba/o-nama/popis-postanskih-ureda ("list of post offices") organised by 5 business regions (HNŽ/ZHŽ/HBŽ/SBŽ+ZDK/PŽ+DB), ~80 offices with postal codes, and a referenced downloadable PDF for pickup logistics. Same shape as BH Pošta's PostNet list — a real official document, but office/pickup- point granularity, not a confirmed complete settlement-level postal code register, and no CSV/bulk export found.

Net: none of the three operators publish a complete, bulk-downloadable national (or even entity-wide) postal-code list. What official documents do exist are express/pickup-point subsets, useful as cross-checks but not a build source on their own.

Wikipedia — the most complete unified list found, but licence-blocked

for this product

Three separate Wikipedia articles, read directly:

• English: Postal codes in Bosnia and Herzegovina — alphabetical directory, 600+ municipality entries, each tagged with its serving operator (BH Pošta / HP Mostar / Pošte Srpske).
• Bosnian: Spisak poštanskih brojeva u Bosni i Hercegovini — larger, ~800+ entries, same alphabetical-by-place / operator-tagged structure, some offices marked closed/temporarily closed.
• Serbian: Списак поштанских бројева у Републици Српској — a proper table (Naselje / Pošta / Poštanski broj / Grad-Opština), explicitly claims to be the complete list of active postal codes for Republika Srpska, organised by all 9 regional work units.

Together these three articles look like the best available approximation of a unified national list — full territorial coverage, all three operators, place + code + (for RS) municipality.

But this is a licence dead end for a paid, resold product, on the exact same reasoning already applied to Wikipedia elsewhere in this catalogue (Spain's admin source, and Seychelles/DR Congo's postal data): Wikipedia text and tables are CC BY-SA — share-alike. A share-alike condition requires any derivative to be redistributed under the same licence terms, which is incompatible with this bucket's paid/exclusive resale model unless the product is scoped to free distribution with attribution only (the pattern this catalogue already used for Greece, sourced from CC BY-SA Eurostat GISCO: is_premium not set, decision scoped explicitly to "compatible for FREE distribution with attribution"). Do not put a Wikipedia-derived BA field into a premium/paid SKU.

GeoNames — confirmed to have ZERO Bosnia and Herzegovina postal

coverage (unusual; triple-checked)

Per the standing rule, GeoNames is the fallback of last resort — but it turns out not to be available at all here:

1. https://download.geonames.org/export/zip/BA.zip → HTTP 404.
2. The GeoNames zip export directory listing itself has no BA.zip entry (checked the neighbouring alphabetical entries — BD, BE, BG, BM, BR, BY are all present; BA is simply absent from the directory).
3. GeoNames' own interactive postal-code search (geonames.org/postalcode-search.html?country=BA) returns an empty results page — consistent with no data, not a fetch/parsing failure.
4. Cross-checked via a third path: zauberware/postal-codes-json-xml-csv on GitHub (CC BY 4.0, an explicit re-export of GeoNames data) — its country list does not include BA either.

All three independent checks agree: GeoNames has never ingested a Bosnia and Herzegovina postal-code source (GeoNames only adds a country once a compatible feed exists — same situation this catalogue already documented for Greece/ELTA). There is no GeoNames fallback available for BA.

Other tiers checked

• UN/LOCODE, ISO, ITU (tier 3): not applicable in the usual way — UN/ LOCODE carries port/place codes, not postal codes, and was not expected to help here; not deep-dived further given the other findings below.
• Community aggregators (tier 5/6): postanskibroj.ba ("largest internet database of postal codes in BiH"), postanskibrojevi.com.hr (Croatian aggregator with a BiH/HP Mostar section), sveznan.com — all three are single-address lookup sites only, no bulk export, no stated reuse licence (postanskibroj.ba shows only a bare "Copyright © 2026" notice, no terms of use). None are usable as a licensed bulk source as-is.
• GitHub (tier 7): no BA-specific community repo found (the general postal-code aggregator repos checked, e.g. zauberware, don't carry BA because their upstream, GeoNames, doesn't either).

Recommended next step

No tier-1/2 bulk source exists, and the two most complete candidates (Wikipedia's three list articles vs. GeoNames) resolve to "licence- blocked for paid resale" and "does not exist" respectively. Options for a human decision, not made here:

1. Build from Wikipedia, scoped free-only — same pattern as Greece: ship it, but with is_premium unset and licence_status.decision explicitly scoped to free distribution + attribution (CC BY-SA), not the paid R2 SKU.
2. Assemble from the three operators' official PDFs (BH Pošta PostNet list, HP Mostar office list, and whatever Pošte Srpske's RS Wikipedia table cites as its own regional-unit source) — likely still leaves large coverage gaps since the two confirmed PDFs are express/pickup-point subsets, not full settlement registers.
3. Leave BA as data_available: false until an actual bulk official/licensable source turns up — the current, safest state.

This note does not recommend one of the three; it is intended to give whoever picks this country up next the full source landscape without re-doing the same checks.