Data Updates and Maintenance

Data Maintenance

National Roads data is sourced and processed continuously, any changes to attribution or geometry for a Roads feature are applied to the National Roads product. These include:

  • When a new road feature is supplied and it passes National Roads validation rules then a new feature is created within the National Roads dataset.

  • When a road feature is supplied that is considered to be an existing road within the National Roads dataset and it passes National Roads validation rules, then if the supply contains changes to the Roads feature these are applied and the date_modified of the feature updated. If there is no change between the supplied road feature and the Roads feature no changes are applied.

  • When a supplier for a Road no longer provides the road or indicates the road has been removed then the corresponding Roads feature is retired from the National Roads dataset.

Data Releases

National Roads is released monthly through the Online Data Delivery System.

Product Versioning

National Roads versioning is managed through incrementing when there is a change to the product schema or a significant change in data population, these are described further below:

  • A schema change can affect a major or minor increment to the versioning. Additive changes (changes that won’t break customers’ ability to work with the data) will be incremented with a minor version increment, an example is the addition of a new attribute. Removal of attributes or changing the structure of the National Roads schema will enact a major change to identify that this requires the attention of all customers and partners.

  • Where a significant geography of Australia either has a new population of data for an attribute or is populated from a much higher quality source a minor increment will be applied to the product version.

Therefore, National Roads versioning will not increment with every data update, published releases will have a name e.g. ‘June 2020’ and will reference a version of the National Roads product e.g. ‘1.1’.