Data.gov.au moves to CKAN platform

The new open source version of the data.gov.au website launched today to improve citizens’ access and engagement with government data sets.

This follows the release of a draft roadmap in April for moving the data.gov.au website to the open source CKAN platform.

“This is just the beginning of a new effort to support and increase the open publishing of government data sets whilst making the data easier to use with API access and some basic data visualisation tools,” Pia Waugh, director of co-ordination and Gov 2.0, wrote in a blog post on the Australian Government Information Management Office website.

“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.

“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.”

The GovHack project ‘Marvellous Ultimate Appliances’ by team Admiral Dolphin won the best use of data.gov.au award this year. The electronic card game is designed to help raise awareness of the energy consumed by common household appliances.

The projects ‘Australia in Review’ and ‘Where did my taxes go?’ also received honourable mentions for their use of the data.gov.au website.

Improving the mobile applications register on the Australia.gov.au website is also part of the draft roadmap. The government plans to make the Australian government’s online app register similar to the apps.usa.gov website. This will start towards the end of the year.

“In this way we can differentiate between government and non-government initiatives, people can rate and comment on mobile initiatives based on government data or services, and we can have a single place where people can find how to access government on their mobile devices,” Waugh wrote.

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