A set of tools & projects around open data in Australia.
To help fulfill a vision for open data - transparency for people-powered, democracy-strengthening, public good projects.
Improving the experience of working with open data by:
- Lowering the bar for access (time and skills) to focus more energy on the societal problems to solve rather than the technicalities
- Broadening the problem-solver profiles around data, not just the CS/IT usual suspects
For open data to reach its full value, it needs a "social governance" layer to address multiple pain points faced by the open data community:
- data everywhere: many organisations have become publishers, leading to an overload of overlapping data sources and data portals. Discoverability and disambiguation are key issues in this data overload.
- adequacy evaluation: getting familiar with a dataset to evaluate its adequacy for a use case is expensive as it involves reviewing (grouped) record counts, value ranges, categories, distribution of values, ...
- data quality: it's often difficult to understand the overall dataset quality (e.g. completeness, recency, outliers, ...) and limitations (e.g. collection method, processing / lineage)
- linkability: datasets are often published as single table / entity but often joining up datasets is where the magic happens, if the datasets can be joined (persistent IDs, spatial references, resolved entities)
- usefulness: most data catalogues present a flat list of datasets but they're far from equal in "usefulness". Surfacing the "highly useable" datasets (popular, good quality, recent, linkable, ...) from the niche ones is a key issue.
Get in touch if this resonates with your vision :-)