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Road Network File, Reference Guide 2010

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Technical specifications

Software formats
Installation instructions
Geographic representation
Attribute domain values

Software formats

The Road Network File is available for download from the Statistics Canada website in the following formats:

ArcInfo^®
File extension: .shp
Geography Markup Language (GML) version 2.1.2
File extension: .gml
MapInfo^®
File extension: .tab

Installation instructions

The ArcInfo^®, Geography Markup Language and MapInfo^® files are compressed into WinZip^® files (file extension .zip).

An additional template (.tem) file is included with the Geography Markup Language files for use with the free GIS data viewer Java Unified Mapping Platform (JUMP). Also, an XML schema file (.xsd) is included to describe and validate the structure and content of the .gml files.

The road names in the Road Network File contain accented characters. These characters can be seen in UNIX and Windows^® versions of ArcInfo^® and MapInfo^®. They were tested on desktop versions of ArcGIS 8.3 and 9.0 and MapInfo^® 7.0 and 7.8. The accents were also visible in ArcInfo^® 8.01 in UNIX. To preserve accents, ArcToolbox™ is recommended for importing files into the desktop version of ArcGIS 9.0.

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Geographic representation

The Road Network File is available on the Statistics Canada website in the following geographic representation:

Datum: NAD83
Coordinates: Longitude/Latitude

Record layout

Table 5.1 Record layout — ArcInfo^® (.shp), Geography Markup Language (.gml), MapInfo^® (.tab) files

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Attribute domain values

Representation of unknown or no value

The null value is used to represent values of the road's name, type and direction that are either missing or non-existent. The zero (0) is used when an address does not exist or is not known.

Street name

This indicates the street name associated with the arc.

Street type

This indicates the street type associated with the arc.

Table 5.2 Street type

Street direction

The arc direction is not the geographic direction of the road feature, but a description used to identify it. A two-character code is related to the arc when the feature is a single or multiple lane addressable street.

Table 5.3 Street direction

Civic addresses (ADDR_FM_LE, ADDR_TO_LE, ADDR_FM_RG, ADDR_TO_RG)

A zero (0) is used when an address does not exist or is not known. This applies to all of the following:

ADDR_FM_LE
The civic address of the road feature found on the left-hand side of the arc at the FROM node.

ADDR_FM_RG
The civic address of the road feature found on the right-hand side of the arc at the FROM node.

ADDR_TO_LE
The civic address of the road feature found on the left-hand side of the arc at the TO node.

ADDR_TO_RG
The civic address of the road feature found on the right-hand side of the arc at the TO node.