A further draft of the Austroads Data Standard for Road Management and Investment in Australia and New Zealand has been released for comment.
The development of a data standard was initiated in 2015 in response to a need to standardise and harmonise data sets that support common road management and investment functions.
The Data Standard focusses on data that is routinely shared between organisations and provides consistency in definition and format. It has been designed to cater for differing levels of road asset complexity and asset management planning to ensure it can be used by small local councils and large agencies and to interface with existing data collection, finance, risk, and information management systems.
The use of consistent road asset data is expected to create opportunities for large and small road managers to share business critical information. It will allow road managers to easily compare information, leading to improved strategic decision making and planning.
Other benefits to road managers include more productive design, construction, maintenance and operation of the roads network. Adopting a standard approach to data storage and reporting is also expected to offer significant time savings.
This version of the standard builds on a draft that was the subject of extensive consultation across Australia and New Zealand in February and March of this year.
Organisations who collect or use road data for their asset and service performance assessment, performance benchmarking, road research, policy development, expenditure comparisons and funding approvals are encouraged to provide feedback on the standard. IPWEA NZ President Peter Higgs and NSW Roads Directorate Manager Mick Savage are IPWEA representatives involved with the metadata and Austroads portfolio.
A copy of the standard and details on how to provide feedback are available for review from the
project website; comments may be submitted until 12 May.