A couple of months ago in the data.gov.au Roadmap we announced we were moving to the CKAN platform. It took a little longer than expected, but today we are proud to launch the new improved data.gov.au!
This is just the beginning of a new effort to support and increase the open publishing of government datasets whilst making the data easier to use with API access and some basic data visualisation tools. We have also cleaned up all the old datasets, added some new ones, are talking to data custodians, and are looking at how we can federate the platform with the other open data platforms around the country.
We are also refreshing all the data custodian account details. Any government people wanting to publish data on the new data.gov.au should email us at data.gov at finance.gov.au.
We’re in the process of looking at adding some new functionality over the coming months and later in the year, but we wanted to get basic publishing right first, so please check out the platform functionality, let us know what you think here in the comments, and help us make data.gov.au ever more awesome.
We have had a beta of the site up since the end of May in time for the national GovHack competition which gave us a prime opportunity to test the platform with large number of developers. Thanks everyone including the GovHack team for using and including data.gov.au in the competition. We are looking closely at the GovHack projects that extended and built upon the data.gov.au functionality, as there were some clever ideas there that we think might be of value.
In other open data news, we have been chatting to open data people in governments all around Australia, from Federal agencies and departments, State/Territory Government representatives and a number of Local Governments. We are pulling together with them something of an informal report on the state of open data in Australia at the moment, as there is a lot happening and a lot planned. Below is a bit of a taste of the good work happening around Australia at the moment, and kudos to the excellent work of all involved!
- National
- Launch of the Updated Digital Economy paper which explicitly talks about data.gov.au, open data (including opening up the G-NAF spatial data set) and big data. See section 10 in the report.
- Launch of new data.gov.au in July 2013
- An Australian Linked Data Working Group was established
- The February 2013 report on the state of open data in Australia by the Information Commissioner Open public sector information: from principles to practice
- New South Wales – launch of http://data.nsw.gov.au/ in June 2013 and draft NSW Government Open Data Policy consulted on in June 2013
- South Australia – launch of http://data.sa.gov.au/ in June 2013 and have been releasing an enormous amount of new and high value datasets
- Queensland – launch of http://data.qld.gov.au/ in February 2013 – they also have a schedule for release of data by all QLD Government Departments
- Victoria:
- Launched http://www.data.vic.gov.au/ in 2010
- Aug 2012 – release of the DataVic Access Policy and the Intellectual Property Policy
- April 2013 – release of the DataVic Access Policy Standards and Guidelines
- July 2013 – integration of the Spatial DataMart and Data.Vic completed with access to over 500 spatial data sources (previously restricted) – current total over 1000 data records
- Western Australia – new version of SLIP (New SLIP) in planning over coming 6 months
- Tasmania – have been working primarily on spatial data requirements for the state for the last year
- Australian Capital Territory – launched http://data.act.gov.au/ late last year
- Community – GovHack 2013 ran in June with 130 projects and over 1000 participants in 8 cities nationally. Also recently was the Random Hacks of Kindness competition in Melbourne and Sydney City Data Slam.
- New Zealand – The NZ Government have created some excellent open data case studies that we highly recommend, including one where the release of traffic density data led to improved prediction of GDP growth and decline in the New Zealand economy.
Please note: we are updating the list above as we get more information from the jurisdictions.
So please let us know in the comments below what you think of the new data.gov.au platform and how we could improve the service.
Cheers,
Pia and the data.gov.au team