[talk-au] I deleted a few locality boundaries...

[Andrew Harvey]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 10:36 PM, Vernon Tang <vt at foilhead.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 8:05 PM, Ross Scanlon <info at 4x4falcon.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 18/12/11 16:43, Andrew Harvey wrote:
>>>
>>> Where do these "official gazetted boundaries" come from?
>>
>> Australian Bureau of Statistics
>
> No they don't. They come from the various states' geographical names
> boards. Unfortunately, none of them appear to have released their
> geodata, except via PSMA ($$$).
>
> The current ABS suburb data are based on "mesh blocks" from the ASGS,
> which are their smallest dividing buckets for census data. (The
> pre-2011 ASGC suburb boundaries were made using a similar process.)
> This means that their boundaries can deviate from the official state
> boundaries, especially in sparsely populated or non-residential areas
> where whole localities can even be missing altogether from the ABS
> data.
>

Yep, quite true.

That said, given the complete failure of the most other government
agencies to release the real gazetted boundaries under a free license,
having the ABS data I think is better than nothing, unless you can
obtain more fine grain data from on the ground surveys.

Licensing aside (as that has been discussed in length in other
threads), is anyone planning to mass import the ABS 2011
suburb/postcode boundaries?