Helen Owens | 26 Feb 2016
As announced today by the Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation, the Hon. Angus Taylor, the Australian Government has made the Geo-coded National Address File (G-NAF) and Administrative Boundaries datasets openly available via data.gov.au for use and re-use at no cost to end users.
Making these datasets openly available is one of the Government’s commitments under the National Innovation and Science Agenda announced on 7 December 2015.
The G-NAF is Australia’s authoritative, geocoded address file and as such it is one of the most requested ubiquitous, high-value datasets that can be made openly available to the economy.
The Administrative Boundaries dataset is Australia’s most comprehensive national collection of boundaries including government, statistical and electoral boundaries.
The G-NAF and Administrative Boundaries datasets are produced by PSMA Australia Limited (PSMA), an unlisted public company formed by the nine governments of Australia to collate and standardise, format and aggregate location data from each of the jurisdictions into authoritative location based national datasets.
This initiative to make the G-NAF and Administrative Boundaries datasets openly available has been achieved through an unprecedented level of collaboration between PSMA and the Commonwealth and State and Territory Governments and also completes two major milestones in the Australia and New Zealand Foundation Spatial Data Framework.
There will be more to come as we continue to work closely with ANZLIC – the Spatial Information Council to make more common foundation spatial datasets ubiquitous across Australia and New Zealand through our comprehensive spatial data infrastructure.
On behalf of the Public Data Branch within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, I would like to thank all those involved in making these datasets open. The support that I have received on this three year journey from my team, my colleagues across the Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments, PSMA, ANZLIC, and the Spatial Industries Business Association has been quite incredible. There were many people that thought we would never achieve this public policy goal but for me it goes to show that through strong cross jurisdictional and agency relationships, resilience and sheer determination, great things can be achieved.
This is a pivotal moment and I am looking forward to hearing about the innovation that can now be achieved with access to these high value datasets. My Branch will now turn to our next goals which will continue to build on the Government’s commitment to better use and reuse of public data by delivering more high value data to the economy and working with Data61 to deliver the world’s best public data infrastructure.
The G-NAF is provided as a Pipe Separated Value (PSV) file and the Administrative Boundaries dataset is provided as an ESRI Shapefile and MapInfo TAB format. Updated versions of these datasets will be published on a quarterly basis from February 2016.
The G-NAF is available at: www.data.gov.au/dataset/geocoded-national-address-file-g-naf
The Administrative Boundaries dataset is available at: www.data.gov.au/dataset/psma-administrative-boundaries
Additional information about the G-NAF and Administrative Boundaries datasets, including FAQs, is available at: www.dpmc.gov.au/pmc/about-pmc/core-priorities/public-data-branch-within-dpmc/geocoded-national-address-data-be-made-openly-available and further information is provided at: www.psma.com.au