The Open Accessibility and Remoteness Index for Australia

<strong>The Open Accessibility and Remoteness Index for Australia.</strong> The "Open Accessibility and Remoteness Index for Australia" is an open-data, national GIS accessibility index for Australia. Many researchers are familiar with the Australian Bureau of Statistics Remoteness Structure, which categorises places in Australia into five classes according to their remoteness. Often it would be more useful to have remoteness measured as a continuous variable, rather than a categorical one however. The ABS Remoteness Structure is based on <em>ARIA+</em>, a continuous remoteness index produced by the National Centre for Social Applications of GIS at the University of Adelaide. Unfortunately, ARIA+ is a commercial product which costs hundreds of dollars. The "Open accessibility and remoteness index for Australia" reimplements the ARIA+ methodology and makes the results freely available in the public domain. The major divergence from the ARIA+ methodology is that where ARIA+ uses network distance along highways to measure proximity, this project uses Euclidian distance. The Open Accessibility and Remoteness Index for Australia is available for 2001, 2006 and 2011 census geographies. Files available for download include 1-km raster data , population-weighted mean values for selected ABS census geographic units and a brief technical report. Please contact Francis Markham with any inquiries.