G-NAF Suburb and Street Matching for Official Documents

The Geocoded National Address File is the authoritative index of Australian addresses, localities and streets, each with a coordinate. Geoscape Australia builds it from state and territory land records and the Commonwealth publishes it openly on data.gov.au every quarter. It is the reference most Australian location data is checked against.

We load G-NAF's localities (suburbs) and streets for every state and territory, each quarterly release, using their primary names. We use them for one job today: placing the events that official publications describe. The first publisher is South Australia Police, whose media releases are collected continuously and served through /api/v1/publications.

• A release that names a street in a suburb gets that street's G-NAF point in that suburb, when G-NAF holds one. For an intersection, or a street G-NAF holds without a point, street still names it but the point and precision are the suburb's.
• A release that names only a suburb gets the suburb's G-NAF point.
• A suburb named only as where someone lives is ignored: it is not where the event happened.
• Names are matched only inside the publisher's own state, never across a border.

A wrong place is worse than no place, so the match is strict and an unmatched release has extract set to null. That happens when:

• the text names several suburbs, as a pursuit or a series of offences does;
• a place is only relative ("near Murray Bridge", "south of Adelaide");
• the name has no match in G-NAF for that state.

Every record states its precision, so a map can draw a street-level point differently from a suburb-level one. The same precision scale runs across the rest of the platform.

A real release, as /api/v1/publications returns it (other fields trimmed):

{
  "title": "Drink driver crashes at Waterloo Corner",
  "extract": {
    "eventAt": null,
    "place": {
      "suburb": "Waterloo Corner",
      "street": "Port Wakefield Road",
      "lat": -34.7268991,
      "lng": 138.5808387,
      "precision": "street"
    },
    "category": null,
    "attributes": {},
    "method": "regex",
    "extractedAt": "2026-10-11T10:27:11.325+00:00"
  }
}

curl "https://dataquoll.io/api/v1/publications?source=sa-police" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

Field definitions are in the API reference.

G-NAF is published under the Open G-NAF End User Licence Agreement: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 with one added restriction, that it is not used to compile addresses for sending mail unless each is checked against a second source. We use it only to place events from their own text. The required attribution is served at /api/v1/attribution:

There is no house-number or full-address lookup. You cannot send DataQuoll an address and get a G-NAF match back: matching runs on the text of official documents, at suburb and street level. If address-level lookup would be useful to you, tell us what you would use it for.