data.gov.au and spatial
*
data.gov.au is the authoritative point of discovery for all Commonwealth data.
* Finance is working closely with the Department of Communications to improve data policy, guidance, support and tools for agencies across the Commonwealth.
* A new
data.gov.au was launched almost a year ago on best practice open data platform, CKAN.
*
data.gov.au functionality has been and continues to be extended to meet the needs of data publishers and data users.
* We are not focused on citizens, we are focused on data users, and believe making programatic access to data creates opportunities for data users to create new analysis and services for a non-technical audience.
* On advice from the Office of Spatial Policy (now the Department of Communications Data Policy Branch), we added a geoserver to the
data.gov.au stack, so government agencies can freely and easily publish their spatial data on
data.gov.au as web services if they don't have the capacity to host their own.
*
data.gov.au is integrated with FIND so that:
a) all Commonwealth spatial data is discoverable through
data.gov.au; and
b) all spatially enabled data hosted or linked on
data.gov.au is discoverable through FIND and viewable on the National Map.
* We have finalised an update of the
data.gov.au metadata to require meaningful spatial metadata, and to encourage and support agencies to improve geocoding within datasets. This is being implemented in the coming weeks.
* We are also working informally with State, Territory and Local Governments to share best practise, metadata standards, documentation and code to better enable reuse of data across jurisdictions.