---
title: Glossary
resource: https://publicdata.au/glossary/
---

# Glossary

Every abbreviation this site uses in its own words is listed here with what it stands for. Publishers' own titles, codes and cell values are quoted as published, so they can hold abbreviations this list does not explain.

- AA: the middle of the three conformance levels in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
- AAA: the highest of the three conformance levels in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
- AADT: annual average daily traffic, the vehicles a day a counting station records averaged over a year
- ABN: Australian Business Number, the eleven-digit identifier the Australian Business Register issues
- ABS: Australian Bureau of Statistics
- ACARA: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which runs the My School website
- ACN: Australian Company Number, the nine-digit identifier ASIC issues to a company
- ACNC: Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission
- ACT: Australian Capital Territory
- AEST: Australian Eastern Standard Time, ten hours ahead of UTC
- AFL: Australian Football League
- AFP: Australian Federal Police, which also polices the Australian Capital Territory
- AGPL: GNU Affero General Public License, the licence the site's code is under
- AI: artificial intelligence, here the assistants and agents that read the site's files
- AIC: Australian Institute of Criminology
- AIHW: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
- API: application programming interface, an address a program reads data from
- APRA: Australian Prudential Regulation Authority
- AQI: air quality index
- ASCII: the plain seven-bit character set, as in a file name with no accents or symbols
- ASGS: Australian Statistical Geography Standard, the ABS boundaries such as SA2 and LGA
- ASIC: Australian Securities and Investments Commission
- ASX: Australian Securities Exchange
- ATO: Australian Taxation Office
- AU: Australia, as in the country code of a web address or a licence
- BDM: Births, Deaths and Marriages, a state registry
- BITRE: Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics
- BOCSAR: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research
- BPAY: the bill payment service run by Australian banks
- CAAB: Codes for Australian Aquatic Biota, the CSIRO species code list
- CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution, a licence that allows any use with credit to the publisher
- CC BY-SA: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, the Attribution licence with a condition that derived works use the same licence
- CED: Commonwealth electoral division, a federal electorate
- CFA: Country Fire Authority, Victoria
- CKAN: the open-source data portal software most Australian government portals run
- CSIRO: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
- CSV: comma-separated values, a plain-text table one row a line
- CSVW: CSV on the Web, the W3C standard that describes a CSV file's columns
- CTH: Commonwealth, the Australian Government
- DBI: the R database interface package
- DCAT: Data Catalog Vocabulary, the W3C standard for describing datasets
- DCCEEW: Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, Australian Government
- DEECA: Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action, Victoria
- DETSI: Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation, Queensland
- DISR: Department of Industry, Science and Resources, Australian Government
- DOI: digital object identifier, a permanent reference for a published work
- DPIRD: Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, Western Australia
- DTP: Department of Transport and Planning, Victoria
- EGM: electronic gaming machine
- EPA: Environment Protection Authority, a state agency
- EPSG: a coordinate reference system code from the register the European Petroleum Survey Group began
- EULA: end user licence agreement
- FAQ: frequently asked questions
- FDSV: family, domestic and sexual violence, an AIHW reporting program
- FDV: family and domestic violence
- FENICS: a market data provider whose overnight indexed swap rates the RBA quotes
- FTE: full-time equivalent
- FY: financial year, which in Australia runs from 1 July to 30 June
- G-NAF: Geocoded National Address File, every Australian address with its coordinates
- GB: gigabyte
- GDA2020: Geocentric Datum of Australia 2020, the coordinate reference frame Australian coordinates are published in
- GDA94: Geocentric Datum of Australia 1994, the frame GDA2020 replaced
- GDAL: Geospatial Data Abstraction Library, the open-source library most mapping software uses to read and write spatial files
- GL: gigalitre, a thousand million litres
- GLS: Government Licensing Service, the NSW licensing system the report is drawn from
- GML: Geography Markup Language, an XML map file format
- GNAF: G-NAF written without its hyphen
- GNU: the free software project whose General Public License the site's code is under
- GPS: Global Positioning System, the satellite system a receiver uses to work out where it is
- GST: goods and services tax
- HTML: the markup language of web pages
- HTTP: the protocol a browser or program uses to fetch a web address
- HTTPS: HTTP over an encrypted connection
- ICSEA: Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage, the scale ACARA uses to compare the backgrounds of schools' students
- ID: identifier
- IP: Internet Protocol, as in the address that identifies a device on the internet
- IPC: interprocess communication, in the name of the Arrow file format that passes a table between programs
- ISO: International Organization for Standardization, as in the ISO 8601 date format
- JP: Justice of the Peace
- JS: JavaScript, as in Arrow JS, the Arrow library for JavaScript
- JSON: JavaScript Object Notation, a plain-text data format programs read
- JSON-LD: JSON for Linking Data, the form of JSON that carries schema.org descriptions
- KB: kilobyte
- KML: Keyhole Markup Language, a map file format
- KMZ: a zipped KML map file
- LGA: local government area, a council's boundary
- LPG: liquefied petroleum gas
- MB: megabyte
- MCP: Model Context Protocol, the standard an AI agent uses to call a server's tools
- MMM: Modified Monash Model, the remoteness classification used for health workforce programs
- NATA: National Association of Testing Authorities, which accredits laboratories
- NDJSON: newline-delimited JSON, one JSON record a line
- NHMD: National Hospital Morbidity Database, held by the AIHW
- NHMP: National Homicide Monitoring Program, run by the Australian Institute of Criminology
- NMD: National Mortality Database, held by the AIHW
- NSW: New South Wales
- NT: Northern Territory
- OLGR: Office of Liquor and Gaming Regulation, Queensland
- PCI: pulverised coal injection coal, a grade used in steelmaking
- PDF: Portable Document Format
- PM&C: Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
- PNG: Portable Network Graphics, an image format
- POA: postal area, the ABS approximation of a postcode
- PSMA: PSMA Australia, now Geoscape, which compiled G-NAF
- Power BI: Microsoft's reporting tool, which reads a CSV from its address
- QBCC: Queensland Building and Construction Commission
- QFD: Queensland Fire Department
- QGIS: a free and open-source desktop program for viewing, editing and analysing maps
- QLD: Queensland
- QPS: Queensland Police Service
- RBA: Reserve Bank of Australia
- RCV: Recorded Crime, Victims, the ABS series the AIHW tabulates
- REST: representational state transfer, the style of web API that answers plain HTTP requests
- RFC: Request for Comments, a numbered internet standard
- RTA: Residential Tenancies Authority, Queensland
- SA: South Australia
- SA2: Statistical Area Level 2, an ABS boundary of about 10,000 people
- SA3: Statistical Area Level 3, an ABS boundary that groups SA2s
- SA4: Statistical Area Level 4, the largest ABS sub-state boundary
- SAL: suburb and locality, an ABS boundary
- SAPOL: South Australia Police
- SED: state electoral division, a state electorate
- SEQ: South East Queensland
- SES: State Emergency Service
- SHA-256: a cryptographic hash, the fingerprint of a file's exact bytes
- SHS: specialist homelessness services
- SLQ: State Library of Queensland
- SQL: Structured Query Language, the language of database queries
- SRO: State Revenue Office, Victoria
- SW: south-west
- TAS: Tasmania
- TIFF: Tagged Image File Format, an image format also used for raster maps
- TMR: Department of Transport and Main Roads, Queensland
- TRAILS: Transport Registration and Integrated Licensing System, Queensland
- TSV: tab-separated values, a plain-text table one row a line
- UNSPSC: United Nations Standard Products and Services Code, a classification of what a contract buys
- URL: web address
- UTC: Coordinated Universal Time
- UTF-8: the Unicode text encoding every file here is written in
- VGCCC: Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission
- VIC: Victoria
- VIN: vehicle identification number
- VS Code: Visual Studio Code, an editor that can connect to the MCP server
- W3C: World Wide Web Consortium, the body that publishes web standards
- WA: Western Australia
- WCAG: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the international standard for accessible web content
- WFS: Web Feature Service, a standard interface for fetching map features
- WGS: World Geodetic System, the coordinate frame GPS uses
- WGS84: World Geodetic System 1984, the coordinate frame GPS uses
- WKB: well-known binary, the standard binary encoding of a geometry such as a point or a polygon
- WMS: Web Map Service, a standard interface for fetching map images
- XLSX: an Excel workbook
- XML: Extensible Markup Language, a plain-text data format
- YAML: the plain-text format the register's entries are written in
- ZIP: a compressed archive of files