National Road Network

Description

The second edition (2.0) of the Nat-ional Road Network data available via the GeoBase portal will be gradually populated to introduce address information to the 1 100 000 kilometres of road network data. The second edition of the NRN will contain the representation of a continuous accurate centerline for all non-restricted use roads in Canada (5 meters or more in width, drivable and no barriers denying access) to which will be added a set of basic attributes, street name, place name and block face address ranges.

The work involved in developing the second edition of the NRN began in 2003 and took two years to complete. The consultation process was accomplished with one-on-one meetings with closest to source providers as well as through national workshops that involved federal, provincial, territorial and municipal stakeholders alike.

In 2005, the second edition of the NRN model was adopted by the Inter Agency Committee on Geomatics (IACG) members and the Canadian Council on Geomatics (CCOG) members.

The new NRN model and content has been defined through national consensus. The NRN contains a standardized and homogeneous data representation. Each geometric feature has an assigned National Identifier (NID). The NID is populated with a universally unique identifier (UUID). The NID's are needed for the management of the data over time and will also be used to identify what changes have occurred between two distributed versions.

To meet the growing request of the User community, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has produced an NRN demo dataset for the province of Prince Edward Island. NRCan wishes to thank both PEI Transportation and Public Works and PEI 911 for their collaboration and contributions.

New edition 2.0 NRN Partnership agreements are currently being jointly negotiated by Natural Resources Canada and Statistics Canada to secure 'closest to source' maintenance principles of GeoBase. It is important to note that the GeoConnections program is providing funding opportunities to participating provinces, territories and lead federal agencies maintaining NRN data.

NRN datasets coming from authoritative data sources will be posted gradually over the coming months. By visiting the GeoBase portal on a regular basis, users will be kept informed of available GeoBase NRN releases.

Documentation

NRN Standards (Conceptual description)

  • National Road Network, Conceptual Model [pdf 2,287 KB]

NRN Product (Data description)

  • National Road Network, Data Product Specifications [pdf 323 KB]
  • National Road Network, Feature Catalogue [pdf 266 KB]
  • National Road Network, Product Distribution Formats [pdf 171 KB]

National Vector Data

  • National Vector Data, Identification Rules [pdf 63 KB]
  • National Vector Data, Change Management [pdf 80 KB]

Metadata

For a complete description of collection metadata, see the National Road Network, Collection Metadata.

Use and Restrictions

All distributed GeoBase NRN datasets should be accessed and used relatively to the GeoBase Unrestricted Use Licence Agreement.

Data Formats

NRN datasets are available in:

  • GML (Geography Markup Language)
  • ESRI Shapefiles
  • KML (Keyhole Markup Language) for Google Earth

KML datasets only provide a partial view of the data content. PEI demo dataset is currently provided as a KML sample.

Free Data Viewers

As a service to GeoBase users we are providing links to some free viewers. However, GeoBase does not endorse and does not provide any kind of support for any of these viewers.