The latest open data presentation for an overview of the Federal data landscape and progress in Australia.

1. 1
The Shift to {Open|Big|Linked} Data
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the data
Pia Waugh
Director of Gov 2.0 and Data
Technology and Procurement Division
Department of Finance

2. 22
Great expectations
Public expectations and problem solving
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zebble/8212264/

3. 33
[Open|Big|Government] Data
Credit: Joel Gurin (with permission)

4. 44
Key Benefits to Community/Industry in Opening Data
Economic
• Creates opportunities for industry to value-add to government data
• New services, systems and industries
• New opportunities and innovation in industry, research, civil society
Accountability
• Visibility to government spending, projects, effectiveness, etc
• Increases incentive to follow evidence based approach
Better policy and programs
• Enables greater participation in policy planning and implementation
• More informed public → better decision making
• Improvements to data → better policy and decisions

5. 55
Key Benefits to the Public Service in Opening Data
• Efficiencies from proactively publishing common requests
• Cheaper and more modular services delivery
• Reduced regulatory burden through machine readable
data supporting compliance and automated reporting
• Better policy outcomes by leveraging cross-agency data
• More consistency & less duplication across government
• Improved opportunities to leverage innovation and
collaboration (citizens, industry, other depts)
• Opportunities to improve data quality through
verifiable public contributions

6. 66
Tips for ensuring benefits realisation of open data
• Adopt an approach of “data user and developer empathy”
• Data publishing built into your BAU
• Initial focus on data that supports you  build capability
• Consume your own data APIs (apps, datavis, BI, etc)
• Ensure you consider:
• Quality – no one can use bad data, but perfect is enemy of the good
• Currency – is it up to date? How often is it updated?
• APIs – is it programmatically available?
• Publishing – have you provided supporting materials (taxonomies)?
• Discoverability – is it hosted or linked on data.gov.au?
• Reusability – have you tested it with data users?
• Licensing – Creative Commons By Attribution the default
• Automation wherever possible!

7. 77
Australia is doing pretty well

8. 88

9. 99
Open Data Portals
Council Portals:
• City of Melbourne
• City of Brisbane

10. 1010
Policies Components
APS policies in aggregate:
• Permissive copyright – CC-BY as the default
• Open by default, machine readable accessible data
• Support reuse and innovation
• More public engagement
• Better use of data for government policy and service development
States/Territories add:
• Procurement – open by design
• Reporting – dashboards
• Departmental strategies
• Declaration of Open Data

11. 1111
Open Data Discovery Model
National
Map
Datavis Application
development
Analysis
& Policy
Value Creation
Discovery
Data
Full Discovery
New
Services
FIND
National
spatial index
(gov, private,
research)

12. 1212
data.gov.au
Free, cloud, scalable API enabled platform for hosting government data.
Staged approach
1. Publishing (2013 – mid 2014)
Improving the functionality and ease of
publishing for agencies with training and
documentation
2. Value realisation (2014-2015)
Providing useful front end tools for data.gov.au
including data visualisation and analysis tools.
Publishing quality data a pre-requisite.
3. Data quality (2014-2015)
Looking at ways to provide agencies the ability
to accept iterative data improvements in a
verifiable way
Features
•Manual and automated publishing options
• API access to government data
• Easy to publish, download & interact
• Use cases and site|data|org analytics
• Data Request Site
• Metadata harvesting from gov data gateways
• National Map integration
• Data model registry
• Federated search for discoverability
In Planning
• 5 star quality plugin
• Selective crowdsourcing for updates
• League Table

13. 1313
NationalMap

14. 1414

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DSS and ATO Statistics

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Spatial Case Study
http://www.finance.gov.au/blog/2014/02/24/guest-post-on-the-value-of-open-roof-prints/
1) Reduced work
2) Value adding
3) Quality
improvements
4) Zero cost API
access to their
own data

17. 1717
The Government Data Landscape (latest version online)

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Other Data Projects
• Administrative
• Spatial
• Research data
• Imagery
• Sensor
• Realtime (eg Transport)
• Census/Statistics
• Cultural
• Data about government
• Fiscal

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Data Integration
• Challenging but great potential for improved policy/services.
• Unit record sharing is complex, raises privacy concerns.
• Unit record data is mostly useful to researchers, who have appropriate
mechanisms with legal, technical, ethical constraints to access such data.
• Data aggregated by common spatial boundaries is comparative across
datasets and over time.
• Unfortunately, data owners traditionally aggregate to boundaries that
constantly change (electorates, postcodes, etc).
• The Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS) provides a
consistent set of spatial boundaries that can be mapped to other needs.
• Anonymisation on the fly APIs also provide mechanism for appropriate
public/agency access to unit record level data (e.g. ABS.Stat)
http://statistical-data-integration.govspace.gov.au/
https://toolkit.data.gov.au/index.php?title=Definitions#Types_of_data

20. 2020
Open by Design – drawing a line in the sand
Building proactive publishing into:
• Systems
• Processes
• Procurement
• Planning
• Records management
Leveraging open data through:
• Public APIs
• Analysis tools and datavis
• Internal processes looking for external sources
• Existing databases!

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Some Challenges
• Education
• Legislative
• Culture
• Systems
• Privacy and anonymisation
• Reactive vs proactive
• Metadata/semantic context
• Too much data
• Real time vs historic
• Definitions and common references
• Limited skills and over specialisation

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New and Old Skills Required
• Publishing and Automation
• Project management, reporting
• Metadata/linked data
• API development and serving
• Plumbing between systems
• Analysis and statistics
• Policy development
• Data, info and policy visualisation
• Public consultation and engagement
• Online community management

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Broader goal: Government as an API
Making all gov data, content, services API enabled
Care of fedAPI.gov

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Support
• http://toolkit.data.gov.au is updated regularly. Recent updates include:
• How to automate data updates to data.gov.au with FME
• Improved information on how to clean data
• How to manage your own catalogue harvesting
• Government data landscape to identify projects of use
• Open Data Community Forum – soon to be moved to analyticsspace
• Talk to your colleagues across government(s)
• Other sources
• Communities of interest: Data Science Meetup groups, Data
Analytics Centre of Excellence, Linked Data Working Group,
National Statistical Service, etc
• GovHack Developers Kit: Become a data scientist in an hour, data
tools, APIs, datavis, spatial, mashup techniques, statistical

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Simplified Guidance, Policy and Case Studies
http://toolkit.data.gov.au

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Key Case Studies
• Publishing Budget 2014 Data Report
• Open data – Transforming the Provider / Stakeholder Paradigm
• On the Value of Open Roof Prints
• 100 years of patent and IP data released on data.gov.au
More available soon at http://toolkit.data.gov.au
Other Australian case studies/documentation
• SA Open Data Toolkit
• QLD Government Case Studies
• Victorian Government Showcase
• NSW Apps Showcase
• ACT examples

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The future is here....
And it is already widely distributed
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_matt/35688926
22/
Challenge #1: Collaborate
Challenge #2: Share
Challenge #3: Measure
Challenge #4: Play
Questions?
@piawaugh
@datagovau
data.gov.au
toolkit.data.gov.au