The 2006 Australian national census will be among the many beneficiaries of a new government database that helps translate addresses into geocoded locations.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is the first to license the Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF), a database of the exact locations of 9.5 million addresses across Australia.
Geocoded addresses are an index of locality, street number and coordinates of longitude and latitude. Owner/resident names are not used for privacy reasons.
The project was officially completed after eight years of development and over $2 million in expenditure.
Led by government-owned Public Sector Mapping Agencies (PSMA), the G-NAF project cross-referenced 32 million addresses from 15 government databases. This eliminated inaccurate records, resulting in the 9.5 million geocoded addresses.
The database will be available to both government and (via resellers) commercial organizations, but will first be used by G-NAF contributors such as ABS, the Australian Electoral Commission and Australia Post.