Daniel Paull
Chief Executive
PSMA
Australia

Biography
Dan Paull is the Chief Executive Officer of PSMA Australia Limited, an unlisted public company limited by shares and owned by the States, Territories and Australian Government. It is a powerful and effective means for collaboration between the governments of Australia.

Abstract
Geocoded Address in Australia

In 2004 PSMA Australia released the Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF). It was the first time a robust methodology had been developed to establish an authoritative reference for geocoded addresses in Australia. It was achieved by sourcing addresses from Australia's postal authority (Australia Post), electoral authority (the Australian Electoral Commission) and each of the eight land titling authorities. Every address was then tested against the national datasets for roads, administrative boundaries and cadastre to confirm accuracy and logical consistency. The process gave rise to a detailed understanding of the relationship between addresses in use and 'official' addresses, thus enabling a rich database to be developed rather than just a reference list of addresses. The method has proved very successful and quarterly updates to this national database of more than 13 million addresses has occured ever since. But the future of address management in Australia will take G-NAF to a whole new level - G-NAF Live. This paper explores the transition that this important national dataset is now making to become a near real-time service offering consumers access to address parsing, validation, geocoding and notification using information that is as up to date as any of the information collected by any of the data contributors. The paper details how this is being achieved within the complex environment of a nine government federation both in terms of the technology and the institutional arrangements. The concept of 'point of truth' is discussed especially as it relates to a federation and how the concept has challenged the notion of individual jurisdictional address datasets as distinct to a single national dataset. The desire to see a continuous maintenance arrangement in the form of G-NAF Live provides an opportunity to more closely bind individual government address maintenance processes to a national process. The paper will also discuss the ability for such a process to enable all consumers to become contributors of information as they apply validation services and discover and notify new or problem addresses.