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The Shift to {Open|Big|Linked} Data Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the data

Pia Waugh Director of Coordination and Gov 2.0

Technology and Procurement Division

Department of Finance

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Great expectations

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zebble/8212264/

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[Open|Big|Government] Data

Credit: Joel Gurin (with permission)

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http://xkcd.com/898/

The emergence of the technocracy

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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

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Key Benefits to the Public Service in Opening Data

• Improved services delivery

• Efficiency gains

• Better policy outcomes

• More consistency across government(s)

• Improved opportunities to leverage innovation and collaboration

• Opportunities to improve data quality through verifiable public contributions

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The APS eGov and Open Data Policy Landscape

Others:

• Publishing Public Sector Information & National Standards Framework

• Declaration of Open Government

• Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report

• Statement of IP Principles for Government (CC-BY)

• Ahead of the Game

• Digital Transition Policy (Archives) & Accessibility Policy

• Emerging Open Research Policies

• Open Public Sector Information: From Principles to Practice Report

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State and Territory Policies

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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

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Policy and Implementation in the Commonwealth

Department of Finance

(CTO & AGIMO)

Department of Communications (Spatial Policy Branch)

Data Efficiency Working Group

(Project 4)

Project 4 Implementation

Sub-group Open Data

Delivery Network (CTO & Spatial Policy Branch)

• Data.gov.au • FIND • NationalMap • NEII • ABS data delivery • Other gov data gateways

• Identify datasets • Release datasets • Identify shared services • Develop private/public

partnerships

• Spatial Policy • Open/Big/Spatial strategic planning

• Open & Big data policy • Open/Big/Spatial strategic planning

Implementation Policy and Planning

Finance

Communications

Joint

Open Data Community Forum

(CTO coordinated)

• Cross-jurisdiction collaboration • Data.gov.au publishing community • Bi-monthly meetings & training • Online forum

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History of open data in Australia

Gov 2.0 Taskforce Report 2009 (based on PoIT UK). Led to:

1) Declaration of Open Government

2) CC-BY as default

3) Information Commissioner

4) data.gov.au and social media support/policy

5) Cloud/shared services

Myriad supporting tech and copyright policies over time

States/Territories, Federal and Local now largely aligned on open data

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Data Portals

Local Portals: • City of Melbourne

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Open Data Discovery Model

Analysis & Policy

Visusalisation & Maps

Application development

Services Value Creation

Discovery

Data

Full Discovery

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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 (Late 2014) Providing useful front end tools for data.gov.au

including data visualisation and analysis tools.

Publishing quality data a pre-requisite.

3. Data quality (Late 2014) Looking at ways to provide agencies the ability

to accept iterative data improvements in a

verifiable way

Features

• Federated search for discoverability

• Manual and automated publishing options

• API access to government data

• Easy to publish, download & interact

• Basic data visualisation capability

• Use cases and site/data/org analytics

• Data Request Site

• Metadata harvesting from gov data gateways

In Planning

• 5 star quality plugin

• Data model registry

• Selective crowdsourcing for updates

• National Map integration

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NationalMap

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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)

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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

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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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Hypothetical: Government as an API

Care of fedAPI.gov

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The future is here....

And it is already widely distributed

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_matt/3568892622/