Digital boundary files

Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3

Date of publication: 20 July 2021
Presentation format: Digital boundaries
Custodian: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Description

The Main Structure and Greater Capital City Statistical Areas of ASGS Edition 3 consists of the following regions:

• Mesh Block (MB)
• Statistical Area Level 1 (SA1)
• Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2)
• Statistical Area Level 3 (SA3)
• Statistical Area Level 4 (SA4)
• Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (GCCSA)
• State and Territory (S/T)
• Australia (AUS)

Nomenclature

File names have the format <file type>_<2021>_<AUST>_<GDA> where:

• <file type> represents the type of boundaries in each file
• MB = Mesh Block
• SA1 = Statistical Area Level 1
• SA2 = Statistical Area Level 2
• SA3 = Statistical Area Level 3
• SA4 = Statistical Area Level 4
• GCCSA = Greater Capital City Statistical Area
• STE = State and Territory
• AUS = Australia
• <2021> represents 2021 the year of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3
• <AUST> indicates the data covers all of Australia
• <GDA> indicates the Geocentric Datum of Australia used, and may equal GDA94 or GDA2020

Within the files, the States and Territories are identified by unique one-digit codes.

File attributes: All tables show file type, file name, field and the data type.

Field length: the attribute field lengths specified below may present differently depending on the type of file and the software used to view tables or boundaries. Data is not truncated or altered in any way by this process.

Data currency

Date of effect: 20 July 2021

Dataset status

Progress: Completed dataset

Maintenance and update frequency: No further updates for these boundaries are planned. There will be a progressive release of the other regions that make up the ASGS until early 2023.

Access

Stored data format: Digital as separate files for each level of the Main Structure and GCCSA of ASGS Edition 3.

Available format: The digital boundary files are in GeoPackage and ESRI Shapefile (.shp) format.

Spatial representation type: Vector

Access constraints: Copyright Commonwealth of Australia administered by the ABS. Unless otherwise noted, content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Datum:

• Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA94)
• Geocentric Datum of Australia 2020 (GDA2020)

Projection: Geographic (i.e. latitudes and longitudes)
Geographic extent: Geographic Australia
Extent - geographic bounding box:
North bounding latitude: -8
South bounding latitude: -45
West bounding latitude: 96
East bounding latitude: 169

Data quality

Lineage: Mesh Block boundaries were created using various sources including the Geoscape digital datasets and ABS boundaries, zoning information from state planning agencies, and imagery. State borders are aligned to Australia’s Land Borders dataset produced by Geoscience Australia.

Positional accuracy: Positional accuracy is an assessment of the closeness of the location of spatial objects in relation to their true positions on the earth's surface.
The positional accuracy includes:

• a horizontal accuracy assessment
• a vertical accuracy assessment

Positional accuracy for ABS boundaries is dependent on the accuracy of the features they have been aligned to.

ABS boundaries are aligned to layers supplied by Geoscape with an accuracy of +/-50 mm. Geoscape layers and their positional accuracy are as follows:

• Transport and Topography: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.
• CadLite: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.
• Administrative Boundaries: Derived from the cadastre data from each Australian state and territory jurisdiction.
• Greenspace and Hydrology: 90% of well-defined features are within 1mm (at plot scale) of their true position, for example 1:500 equates to +/- 0.5 metre and 1:25,000 equates to +/- 25 metres. Relative spatial accuracy of these themes reflects that of the jurisdictional source data. The accuracy is +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas. No "shift" of data as a means of "cartographic enhancement" to facilitate presentation has been employed for any real world feature.
• Precision: Boundary coordinates have been rounded to 8 decimal places, equivalent to 1.1132 mm at the equator. All ABS boundaries have been generalised to 5 cm with a 7.5 cm shared boundary tolerance.
• Attribute accuracy: All codes and labels for all levels within the ASGS Edition 3 Main Structure and GCCSAs are fully validated.
• Logical consistency: Regions are closed polygons. Attribute records without spatial objects have been included in the data for administrative purposes.
• Completeness: All levels of the Main Structure and GCCSAs within ASGS Edition 3 are represented.

XML metadata files

The compressed download files include geospatial metadata data for each region type in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. The geospatial metadata conforms to International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) geospatial metadata standard, ISO 19115:2003, and the associated XML implementation schema specified by ISO 19139:2012.

Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3

Date of publication: 6 October 2021
Presentation format: Digital boundaries
Custodian: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Description

The Indigenous Structure of ASGS Edition 3 consists of the following regions:

• Indigenous Locations (ILOC)
• Indigenous Areas (IARE)
• Indigenous Regions (IREG)

Nomenclature

File names have the format <file type>_<2021>_<AUST>_<GDA> where:

• <file type> represents the type of boundaries in each file
• ILOC = Indigenous Location
• IARE = Indigenous Area
• IREG = Indigenous Region
• <2021> represents 2021 the year of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3
• <AUST> indicates the data covers all of Australia
• <GDA> indicates the Geocentric Datum of Australia used and may equal GDA94 or GDA2020

Within the files, the States and Territories are identified by unique one digit codes, as listed below.

File attributes: All tables show file type, file name, field and the data type.

Field length: the attribute field lengths specified below may present differently depending on the type of file and the software used to view tables or boundaries. Data is not truncated or altered in any way by this process.

Data currency

Date of effect: 6 October 2021

Dataset status

Progress: Completed dataset

Maintenance and update frequency: No further updates for these boundaries are planned. There will be a progressive release of the other regions that make up the ASGS until early 2023. ASGS Edition 4 boundaries will be released progressively from 2026.

Access

Stored data format: Digital as separate files for each level of the Indigenous Structure of ASGS Edition 3.

Available format: The digital boundary files are in GeoPackage and ESRI Shapefile (.shp) format.

Spatial representation type: Vector

Access constraints: Copyright Commonwealth of Australia administered by the ABS. Unless otherwise noted, content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Datum:

• Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA94)
• Geocentric Datum of Australia 2020 (GDA2020)

Projection: Geographic (i.e. latitudes and longitudes)
Geographic extent: Geographic Australia
Extent - geographic bounding box:
North bounding latitude: -8
South bounding latitude: -45
West bounding latitude: 96
East bounding latitude: 169

Data quality

Lineage: Boundaries were created using various sources including the Geoscape digital datasets and ABS boundaries, zoning information from state planning agencies, and imagery. State borders are aligned to Australia’s Land Borders dataset produced by Geoscience Australia.

Positional accuracy: Positional accuracy is an assessment of the closeness of the location of spatial objects in relation to their true positions on the earth's surface.
The positional accuracy includes:

• a horizontal accuracy assessment
• a vertical accuracy assessment

Positional accuracy for ABS boundaries is dependent on the accuracy of the features they have been aligned to.

ABS boundaries are aligned to layers supplied by Geoscape with an accuracy of +/-50 mm. Geoscape layers and their positional accuracy are as follows:

• Transport and Topography: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.
• CadLite: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.
• Administrative Boundaries: Derived from the cadastre data from each Australian state and territory jurisdiction.
• Greenspace and Hydrology: 90% of well-defined features are within 1mm (at plot scale) of their true position, for example 1:500 equates to +/- 0.5 metre and 1:25,000 equates to +/- 25 metres. Relative spatial accuracy of these themes reflects that of the jurisdictional source data. The accuracy is +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas. No "shift" of data as a means of "cartographic enhancement" to facilitate presentation has been employed for any real world feature.
• Precision: Boundary coordinates have been rounded to 8 decimal places, equivalent to 1.1132 mm at the equator. All ABS boundaries have been generalised to 5 cm with a 7.5 cm shared boundary tolerance.
• Attribute accuracy: All codes and labels for all levels within the ASGS Edition 3 Indigenous Structure are fully validated.
• Logical consistency: Regions are closed polygons. Attribute records without spatial objects have been included in the data for administrative purposes.
• Completeness: All levels of the Indigenous Structure within ASGS Edition 3 are represented.

XML metadata files

The compressed download files include geospatial metadata data for each region type in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. The geospatial metadata conforms to International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) geospatial metadata standard, ISO 19115:2003, and the associated XML implementation schema specified by ISO 19139:2012.

Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3

Date of publication: 6 October 2021
Updated: 12 December 2024
Presentation format: Digital boundaries
Custodian: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Description

Non ABS Structures of ASGS Edition 3 consist of the following regions:

• Local Government Areas (LGA)
• State Electoral Divisions (SED)
• Commonwealth Electoral Divisions (CED)
• Postal Areas (POA)
• Tourism Regions (TR)
• Australian Drainage Divisions (ADD)
• Suburbs and Localities (SAL)
• Destination Zones (DZN)

Nomenclature

File names have the format <file type>_<YEAR>_<AUST>_<GDA> where:

• <file type> represents the type of boundaries in each file
• LGA = Local Government Areas
• SED = State Electoral Divisions
• CED = Commonwealth Electoral Divisions
• POA = Postal Areas
• TR = Tourism Regions
• ADD = Australian Drainage Divisions
• SAL = Suburbs and Localities
• DZN = Destination Zones
• <YEAR> represents the reference year of boundaries
• <AUST> indicates the data covers all of Australia
• <GDA> indicates the Geocentric Datum of Australia used and may equal GDA94 or GDA2020

Within the files, the states and territories are identified by unique one-digit codes.

File attributes: All tables show file type, file name, field and the data type.

Field length: the attribute field lengths specified below may present differently depending on the type of file and the software used to view tables or boundaries. Data is not truncated or altered in any way by this process.

Data currency

Date of effect: 6 October 2021

Dataset status

Progress: Completed dataset

Maintenance and update frequency: The Non ABS Structures represent regions that are subject to ongoing change. For consistency, most Non ABS Structures are updated every five years. These boundaries will be updated next in 2026. Local Government Areas will be revised annually regardless of substantive change to source boundaries. State Electoral Divisions and Commonwealth Electoral Divisions will be reviewed and updated annually only when substantive changes are made to source boundaries.

Access

Stored data format: Digital as separate files for each Non ABS Structure within the ASGS Edition 3.

Available format: The digital boundary files are in GeoPackage and ESRI Shapefile (.shp) format.

Spatial representation type: Vector

Access constraints: Copyright Commonwealth of Australia administered by the ABS. Unless otherwise noted, content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Datum:

• Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA94)
• Geocentric Datum of Australia 2020 (GDA2020)

Projection: Geographic (i.e. latitudes and longitudes)
Geographic extent: Geographic Australia
Extent - geographic bounding box:
North bounding latitude: -8
South bounding latitude: -45
West bounding latitude: 96
East bounding latitude: 169

Data quality

Lineage: Mesh Block boundaries were created using various sources including the Geoscape digital datasets and ABS boundaries, zoning information from state and territory planning agencies, and imagery. State and territory borders are aligned to Australia’s Land Borders dataset produced by Geoscience Australia. Some Non ABS Structures have additional sources including:

• SED: State and territory digital datasets from respective electoral authorities
• CED: Australian Electoral Commission federal electoral divisions
• ADD: Bureau of Meteorology Geofabric
• TR: Tourism Research Australia tourism regions

Positional accuracy: Positional accuracy is an assessment of the closeness of the location of spatial objects in relation to their true positions on the earth's surface.
The positional accuracy includes:

• a horizontal accuracy assessment
• a vertical accuracy assessment

Positional accuracy for ABS boundaries is dependent on the accuracy of the features they have been aligned to.

ABS boundaries are aligned to layers supplied by Geoscape with an accuracy of +/-50 mm. Geoscape layers and their positional accuracy are as follows:

• Transport and Topography: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.
• CadLite: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.
• Administrative Boundaries: Derived from the cadastre data from each Australian state and territory jurisdiction.
• Greenspace and Hydrology: 90% of well-defined features are within 1mm (at plot scale) of their true position, for example 1:500 equates to +/- 0.5 metre and 1:25,000 equates to +/- 25 metres. Relative spatial accuracy of these themes reflects that of the jurisdictional source data. The accuracy is +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas. No "shift" of data as a means of "cartographic enhancement" to facilitate presentation has been employed for any real world feature.
• Precision: Boundary coordinates have been rounded to 8 decimal places, equivalent to 1.1132 mm at the equator. All ABS boundaries have been generalised to 5 cm with a 7.5 cm shared boundary tolerance.
• Attribute accuracy: All codes and labels for all structures within the ASGS Edition 3 Non ABS Structures are fully validated.
• Logical consistency: Regions are closed polygons. Attribute records without spatial objects have been included in the data for administrative purposes.
• Completeness: All structures within the ASGS Edition 3 Non ABS Structures are represented.

XML metadata files

The compressed download files include geospatial metadata data for each region type in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. The geospatial metadata conforms to International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) geospatial metadata standard, ISO 19115:2003, and the associated XML implementation schema specified by ISO 19139:2012.

Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3

Date of publication: 5 October 2022
Presentation format: Digital boundaries
Custodian: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Description

The Significant Urban Areas, Urban Centres and Localities, Section of State and Section of State Range of ASGS Edition 3 consists of the following regions:

• Significant Urban Areas (SUA)
• Urban Centres and Localities (UCL)
• Section of State (SOS)
• Section of State Region (SOSR)

Nomenclature

File names have the format <file type>_<2021>_<AUST>_<GDA> where:

• <file type> represents the type of boundaries in each file
• SUA = Significant Urban Area
• UCL = Urban Centre and Locality
• SOS = Section of State
• SOSR = Section of State Region
• <2021> represents 2021 the year of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3
• <AUST> indicates the data covers all of Australia
• <GDA> indicates the Geocentric Datum of Australia used, and may equal GDA94 or GDA2020

Within the files, the States and Territories are identified by unique one-digit codes.

File attributes: All tables show file type, file name, field and the data type.

Field length: the attribute field lengths specified below may present differently depending on the type of file and the software used to view tables or boundaries. Data is not truncated or altered in any way by this process.

Data currency

Date of effect: 5 October 2022

Dataset status

Progress: Completed dataset

Maintenance and update frequency: No further updates for these boundaries are planned. There will be a progressive release of the other regions that make up the ASGS until early 2023.

Access

Stored data format: Digital as separate files for Significant Urban Areas, Urban Centres and Localities, Section of State and Section of State Range of ASGS Edition 3.

Available format: The digital boundary files are in GeoPackage and ESRI Shapefile (.shp) format.

Spatial representation type: Vector

Access constraints: Copyright Commonwealth of Australia administered by the ABS. Unless otherwise noted, content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Datum:

• Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA94)
• Geocentric Datum of Australia 2020 (GDA2020)

Projection: Geographic (i.e. latitudes and longitudes)
Geographic extent: Geographic Australia
Extent - geographic bounding box:
North bounding latitude: -8
South bounding latitude: -45
West bounding latitude: 96
East bounding latitude: 169

Data quality

Lineage: Boundaries were created using various sources including the Geoscape digital datasets and ABS boundaries, zoning information from state planning agencies and imagery. State borders are aligned to Australia’s Land Borders dataset produced by Geoscience Australia.

Positional accuracy: Positional accuracy is an assessment of the closeness of the location of spatial objects in relation to their true positions on the earth's surface.
The positional accuracy includes:

• a horizontal accuracy assessment
• a vertical accuracy assessment

Positional accuracy for ABS boundaries is dependent on the accuracy of the features they have been aligned to.

ABS boundaries are aligned to layers supplied by Geoscape with an accuracy of +/-50 mm. Geoscape layers and their positional accuracy are as follows:

• Transport and Topography: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.
• CadLite: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.
• Administrative Boundaries: Derived from the cadastre data from each Australian state and territory jurisdiction.
• Greenspace and Hydrology: 90% of well-defined features are within 1mm (at plot scale) of their true position, for example 1:500 equates to +/- 0.5 metre and 1:25,000 equates to +/- 25 metres. Relative spatial accuracy of these themes reflects that of the jurisdictional source data. The accuracy is +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas. No "shift" of data as a means of "cartographic enhancement" to facilitate presentation has been employed for any real world feature.
• Precision: Boundary coordinates have been rounded to 8 decimal places, equivalent to 1.1132 mm at the equator. All ABS boundaries have been generalised to 5 cm with a 7.5 cm shared boundary tolerance.
• Attribute accuracy: All codes and labels for all levels within the ASGS Edition 3 Significant Urban Areas, Urban Centres and Localities, Section of State and Section of State Range are fully validated.
• Logical consistency: Regions are closed polygons. Attribute records without spatial objects have been included in the data for administrative purposes.
• Completeness: All levels of Significant Urban Areas, Urban Centres and Localities, Section of State and Section of State Range within ASGS Edition 3 are represented.

XML metadata files

The compressed download files include geospatial metadata data for each region type in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. The geospatial metadata conforms to International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) geospatial metadata standard, ISO 19115:2003, and the associated XML implementation schema specified by ISO 19139:2012.

Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3

Date of publication: 21 March 2023
Presentation format: Digital boundaries
Custodian: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Description

The Remoteness Structure of ASGS Edition 3 consists of the following region:

Remoteness Areas (RA)

Nomenclature

File names have the format <file type>_<2021>_<AUST>_<GDA> where:

<file type> represents the type of boundaries in each file

RA = Remoteness Area

<2021> represents 2021 the year of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) Edition 3

<AUST> indicates the data covers all of Australia

<GDA> indicates the Geocentric Datum of Australia used, and may equal GDA94 or GDA2020

Within the files, the States and Territories are identified by unique one-digit codes.

File attributes: All tables show file type, file name, field and the data type.

Field length: the attribute field lengths specified below may present differently depending on the type of file and the software used to view tables or boundaries. Data is not truncated or altered in any way by this process.

Data currency

Date of effect: 21 March 2023

Dataset status

Progress: Completed dataset

Maintenance and update frequency: No further updates for these boundaries are planned.

Access

Stored data format: [JM1] Digital as separate files for of ASGS Edition 3.

Available format: The digital boundary files are in GeoPackage and ESRI Shapefile (.shp) format.

Spatial representation type: Vector

Access constraints: Copyright Commonwealth of Australia administered by the ABS. Unless otherwise noted, content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Datum:

Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994 (GDA94)

Geocentric Datum of Australia 2020 (GDA2020)

Projection: Geographic (i.e. latitudes and longitudes)
Geographic extent: Geographic Australia
Extent - geographic bounding box:
North bounding latitude: -8
South bounding latitude: -45
West bounding latitude: 96
East bounding latitude: 169

Data quality

Lineage: Boundaries were created using various sources including the Geoscape digital datasets and ABS boundaries, zoning information from state planning agencies and imagery. State borders are aligned to Australia’s Land Borders dataset produced by Geoscience Australia.

Positional accuracy: Positional accuracy is an assessment of the closeness of the location of spatial objects in relation to their true positions on the earth's surface.
The positional accuracy includes:

a horizontal accuracy assessment

a vertical accuracy assessment

Positional accuracy for ABS boundaries is dependent on the accuracy of the features they have been aligned to.

ABS boundaries are aligned to layers supplied by Geoscape with an accuracy of +/-50 mm. Geoscape layers and their positional accuracy are as follows:

Transport and Topography: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.

CadLite: +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas.

Administrative Boundaries: Derived from the cadastre data from each Australian state and territory jurisdiction.

Greenspace and Hydrology: 90% of well-defined features are within 1mm (at plot scale) of their true position, for example 1:500 equates to +/- 0.5 metre and 1:25,000 equates to +/- 25 metres. Relative spatial accuracy of these themes reflects that of the jurisdictional source data. The accuracy is +/- 2 metres in urban areas and +/- 10 metres in rural and remote areas. No "shift" of data as a means of "cartographic enhancement" to facilitate presentation has been employed for any real world feature.

Precision: Boundary coordinates have been rounded to 8 decimal places, equivalent to 1.1132 mm at the equator. All ABS boundaries have been generalised to 5 cm with a 7.5 cm shared boundary tolerance.

Attribute accuracy: All codes and labels for all levels within the ASGS Edition 3 Significant Urban Areas, Urban Centres and Localities, Section of State and Section of State Range are fully validated.

Logical consistency: Regions are closed polygons. Attribute records without spatial objects have been included in the data for administrative purposes.

Completeness: All levels of Significant Urban Areas, Urban Centres and Localities, Section of State and Section of State Range within ASGS Edition 3 are represented.

XML metadata files

The compressed download files include geospatial metadata data for each region type in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format. The geospatial metadata conforms to International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) geospatial metadata standard, ISO 19115:2003, and the associated XML implementation schema specified by ISO 19139:2012.