Australia's Land Borders is a product within the Foundation Spatial Data Framework (FSDF) suite of datasets. It is endorsed by the ANZLIC - the Spatial Information Council and the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM) as a nationally consistent and topologically correct representation of the land borders published by the Australian states and territories.

The purpose of this product is to provide: (i) a building block which enables development of other national datasets; (ii) integration with other geospatial frameworks in support of data analysis; and (iii) visualisation of these borders as cartographic depiction on a map. Although this dataset depicts land borders, it is not nor does it suggests to be a legal definition of these borders. Therefore it cannot and must not be used for those use-cases pertaining to legal context.

This product is constructed by Geoscience Australia (GA), on behalf of the ICSM, from authoritative open data published by the land mapping agencies in their respective Australian state and territory jurisdictions. Construction of a nationally consistent dataset required harmonisation and mediation of data issues at abutting land borders. In order to make informed and consistent determinations, other datasets were used as visual aid in determining which elements of published jurisdictional data to promote into the national product. These datasets include, but are not restricted to: (i) PSMA Australia's commercial products such as the cadastral (property) boundaries (CadLite) and Geocoded National Address File (GNAF); (ii) Esri's World Imagery and Imagery with Labels base maps; and (iii) Geoscience Australia's GEODATA TOPO 250K Series 3. Where practical, Land Borders do not cross cadastral boundaries and are logically consistent with addressing data in GNAF.

It is important to reaffirm that although third-party commercial datasets are used for validation, which is within remit of the licence agreement between PSMA and GA, no commercially licenced data has been promoted into the product. Australian Land Borders are constructed exclusively from published open data originating from state, territory and federal agencies.

This foundation dataset consists of edges (polylines) representing mediated segments of state and/or territory borders, connected at the nodes and terminated at the coastline defined as the Mean High Water Mark (MHWM) tidal boundary. These polylines are attributed to convey information about provenance of the source. It is envisaged that land borders will be topologically interoperable with the future national coastline dataset/s, currently being built through the ICSM coastline capture collaboration program. Topological interoperability will enable closure of land mass polygon, permitting spatial analysis operations such as vector overly, intersect, or raster map algebra. In addition to polylines, the product incorporates a number of well-known survey-monumented corners which have historical and cultural significance associated with the place name.

This foundation dataset is constructed from the best-available data, as published by relevant custodian in state and territory jurisdiction. It should be noted that some custodians - in particular the Northern Territory and New South Wales - have opted out or to rely on data from abutting jurisdiction as an agreed portrayal of their border. Accuracy and precision of land borders as depicted by spatial objects (features) may vary according to custodian specifications, although there is topological coherence across all the objects within this integrated product. The guaranteed minimum nominal scale for all use-cases, applying to complete spatial coverage of this product, is 1:25 000. In some areas the accuracy is much better and maybe approaching cadastre survey specification, however, this is an artefact of data assembly from disparate sources, rather than the product design. As the principle, no data was generalised or spatially degraded in the process of constructing this product.

Some use-cases for this product are: general digital and web map-making applications; a reference dataset to use for cartographic generalisation for a smaller-scale map applications; constraining geometric objects for revision and updates to the Mesh Blocks, the building blocks for the larger regions of the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) framework; rapid resolution of cross-border data issues to enable construction and visual display of a common operating picture, etc.

This foundation dataset will be maintained at irregular intervals, for example if a state or territory jurisdiction decides to publish or republish their land borders. If there is a new version of this dataset, past version will be archived and information about the changes will be made available in the change log.