The NRN was adopted by members from the Inter-Agency Committee on Geomatics (IACG) and the Canadian Council on Geomatics (CCOG) to provide quality geospatial and attributive data (current, accurate, consistent), homogeneous and normalized of the entire Canadian road network. The NRN is part of the GeoBase initiative which aims to provide a common geospatial infrastructure that is maintained on a regular basis by closest to source organizations.
The NRN is distributed in the form of thirteen provincial / territorial datasets consisting of two linear entities (road segments and ferry segments), three punctual entities (junctions, blocked passages, and toll points), and three tabular entities (address ranges, street and place names, and alternative name linkages). Currently, the NRN is publicly available on the Open Government data portal.
The NRN content largely conforms to ISO 14825.
The repository of the NRN project is referred to by its actual repository name: nrn-rrn.
The nrn-rrn has no mandatory software dependencies but highly recommends the software specified in this section. Furthermore, documentation for nrn-rrn installation and usage will make use of this software since it represents the easiest and recommended approach.
Conda is a package and virtual environment management system and is strongly recommended for using the nrn-rrn. Conda is available in several software including Anaconda and Miniconda, but the recommended choice is to use Miniforge3 due to being a minimal installer and specific to the conda-forge channel.
Use the following steps to install the nrn-rrn repository and conda environment:
- Install the repository.
Using Git:
git clone https://github.com/StatCan/nrn-rrn.git- Manual install: Download and unzip the repository.
Create the conda environment from the
environment.ymlfile:conda env create -f nrn-rrn/environment.yml