About DAPlanner

Methodology, data sources, and disclaimer

What It Is

DAPlanner is a free reference tool for searching and comparing development consent conditions across Greater Sydney councils. It was built to solve a simple problem: there is no easy way to compare what different councils require in their DA conditions.

Planning officers, consultants, developers, and lawyers currently have to manually download consent PDFs from the NSW Planning Portal, open each one, and read through the conditions. DAPlanner makes that data searchable.

Data Source

All conditions are extracted from determination documents published on the NSW Planning Portal. These are panel-determined DAs (typically with a Capital Investment Value over $30 million), which tend to have the most detailed and comprehensive conditions.

Conditions are extracted using a combination of PDF text extraction and AI-powered keyword matching across 8 specialist profiles: contamination & noise, flooding, traffic, biodiversity, waste, heritage, accessibility, and bushfire.

Methodology

  1. 1 Download determination documents from the NSW Planning Portal (PDFs and DOCX files)
  2. 2 Extract text using PDF text extraction libraries
  3. 3 Match conditions to categories using keyword profiles with include/exclude regex patterns
  4. 4 Attribute each condition to a council using a multi-method matching pipeline (LEP references, DA number formats, suburb-to-LGA mapping, council name scanning)
  5. 5 Clean the data: remove extraction artefacts (page headers, numbering fragments), deduplicate within the same DA, drop any conditions that cannot be reliably attributed to a council

Full methodology documentation is available in the project's DAPLANNER_DATA_METHODOLOGY.md file.

What the Error Audit Checks

The AI audit checks every condition against 10 error categories:

  1. 1 Outdated legislation references (wrong Act names, wrong years, wrong section numbers)
  2. 2 Outdated agency names (abolished agencies like WorkCover NSW, RMS)
  3. 3 Outdated Australian Standard editions
  4. 4 Spelling errors
  5. 5 Grammar errors / incomplete sentences
  6. 6 Placeholder text not removed (XXXX, ##)
  7. 7 Unenforceable conditions (missing recipients, blank fields)
  8. 8 Internal inconsistencies (same thing referred to differently within one consent)
  9. 9 Numbering errors (duplicate numbers, missing numbers)
  10. 10 Outdated council/instrument references (pre-merger LEP/DCP names)

Built By

DAPlanner was built by Priscilla Prakash, a town planner based in NSW. The project demonstrates AI capability for planning quality assurance — specifically, how AI can be used to audit consent conditions at a speed and scale that would be impractical manually.

Disclaimer

The information on this site is provided for reference purposes only. It is not legal advice. Conditions are reproduced verbatim as extracted from publicly available determination documents on the NSW Planning Portal.

Data quality notes: Conditions are extracted from PDF documents using automated text extraction. Some conditions may be incomplete fragments (where the extraction captured part of a longer condition), may contain formatting artefacts from PDF conversion, or may not have a DA number attributed. Conditions sourced from council business papers or panel agendas may represent draft recommended conditions that were subject to modification by the determining panel — they may not reflect the final conditions as issued.

Always verify conditions against the original determination documents available on the NSW Planning Portal.

DA conditions of consent are public records under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 (GIPA). All conditions are attributed to their source council and DA number where available.