Geoscape Datasets

This post forms part of the ongoing #TagHub project.

The project uses as reference data Geoscape Datasets for Australian roads and administrative boundaries. Over the years, I have worked with these datasets under commercial licence, but happily they are now available for public use under The Australian Government's Data and Digital Government Strategy. Let's take a look at them.

Geoscape National Roads

Note: National Roads © Geoscape Australia licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).

The Geoscape National Roads dataset is a digital representation of the road network of Australia, inclusive of bus ways, walking trails, cycleways, and even ferry routes. The dataset has rich metadata, inclusive of road hierarchy (e.g. national highway, arterial, local road) and travel direction. One facet I like is that each row – and its associated geometry – is defined intersection-to-intserection (e.g. an actual road might be broken into multiple rows, with each row being the segment between two intersections).

The open edition of this dataset varies subtly from the commercially licensed edition. Firstly, the metadata is almost (but not quite) identical:

Secondly, there are more limited data formats and datums. My intention is to work with GDA2020 in GDB format.

Geoscape Administrative Boundaries

Note: Administrative Boundaries © Geoscape Australia licensed by the Commonwealth of Australia under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0).

GDA2020 downloaded in SHP format

Geoscape Administrative Boundaries

ABS Boundaries

Tags: #TagHub #Geospatial #DuckDB