About

The Queensland Geotechnical Database emerged from meetings held by the Queensland Chapter of the Australian Geomechanics Society to facilitate access to geotechnical information for the benefit of practitioners and researchers.

QGD was established at the ODI Australian Network in 2017 and from 2019, is now hosted by the University of Queensland Sustainable Infrastructure Research Hub.

Please contact to inquire about contributing logs.

Vision

Geotechnical investigation information procured by taxpayers should be in the public domain, with some limitations. A public geotechnical database can improve the efficiency of new investigations and enable or even instigate research and development that will be beneficial for the profession.

Contact

Available Data

There are two types of data currently available:

1. Geotechnical documents (e.g. a borehole log in PDF format).
2. An index to the geotechnical documents.

While data and documents are licensed individually, all are licensed under open licences. Each licence describes what you can do with the data and may require you to do, for example:

• Acknowledge the data owner (i.e. attribution).
• Re-publish any new content or data you create using the data under the same open licence.

If you have questions or suggestions about how the data is published, please contact us. Questions regarding the contents of a geotechnical document should be directed to the contributing organisation (data owner).

QGD usage data is collected anonymously via Google Analytics and may be requested from the Admin.

Some additional TMR logs that have not yet been added to QGD are available for download; 2018-09-28 (595 MB).

Geotechnical Documents

Geotechnical documents are the factual results of ground investigations and may be borehole logs, test pits, cone penetration tests or similar.

Documentation

You are encouraged to refer to the following sources to assist in interpreting the geotechnical documents in the database:

• Geotechnical borehole logging page provides access to resources for the recording and interpretation of borehole logs compiled by the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads

Licence

The geotechnical documents are protected by copyright, and are available under licence. You must follow the terms of the licence. Licence information is embedded in each geotechnical document.

For example, a borehole log may include a copyright notice, limitation of liability and a footer similar to:

© State of Queensland (Department of Transport and Main Roads) 2024, CC BY 4.0

Quality Statement

Geotechnical documents are unaltered and published as provided by the data owner.

Geotechnical documents are ★ (1 star) open data in the 5-star open data scheme.

Document Index

The document index summarises information about the geotechnical documents. Most index entries will link to the associated geotechnical document however some documents may not be published under an open licence. Contact the organisation for that index entry to determine if the document can be shared under another licence.

Spatial Uncertainty

Coordinates are stored as decimal latitude and longitude on the Geocentric Datum of Australia (GDA94). These geographic coordinates can be readily transformed to other datums or projected to grid coordinates (MGA94, easting and northing) as necessary by the User.

Coordinates and their associated uncertainty have been recorded by best effort and the Terms of Use disclaimers apply. Where coordinates are available for geotechnical data they have been compared with site plans and either accepted or amended in the best judgement of the data collector. Where coordinates are not available or in an unknown local datum, coordinates have been estimated from site plans.

The estimated uncertainty of these coordinates has been recorded in QGD as follows.

The QGD map page is built with Mapbox GL JS and plots the stored GDA94 coordinates on the WGS84 Web Mercator projection. GDA94 and WGS84 coordinate positions are similar (within 1 to 2 m), but are moving apart at a rate of roughly 7 cm per year. Web Mercator is also a slight variant of the Mercator projection causing local areas to deviate from true ellipsoidal Mercator maps. These errors should account for approximately 2 m of deviation from the GDA94 coordinates to the positions displayed on the QGD map page.

Licence

The QGD Document Index is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence. This work is a derivative of the Geotechnical Documents above.

Please give attribution to: © Queensland Geotechnical Database and its Contributors 2024 when reusing the index.

Quality Statement

Refer Spatial Uncertainty above.

The document index is ★★★ (3 star) open data in the 5-star open data scheme.