Data.gov.au last week added an additional 2,503 datasets to its already extensive archives, including around 1,500 datasets consisting location information from across Australia.
The new datasets were added in collaboration with Geoscience Australia and the Spatial Policy Branch in the Department of Communications. The data is hosted by Geoscience Australia and includes current and historical data ranging from full web services to old scientific manuals.
The location information, which forms the largest part of the new collection, breaks Australia up into a series of location tiles, and each tile has a series of data and metadata associated with it. The spatial coverage metadata will allow users to easily browse data by location.
To see datasets that relate to your location, including from the new Geoscience Australia data series, you can select an area with the map tool at the bottom of the left hand sidebar from the datasets page.
Pia Waugh, on the Department of Finance blog, wrote this about the new data:
“The Geoscience Australia broader public collection includes almost 20,000 sources but most of these do not include raw machine readable datasets so we have not included them on data.gov.au. You can find the other 17,500 or so resources at the GeoScience Australia Metadata Gateway, including documents such as old scanned manuals, scanned images of maps, hardcopy resources, and historic, but still useful, information sources. Many of the resources are freely available for download under Creative Commons BY licences. Some have an associated charge which is generally where the data is only available in an offline format and there is a cost to distribute it to you. We have included an index dataset of all 20,000 Geoscience Australia data and non-data resources here to assist in discoverability.”
You can find the new data published under the Geoscience Australia organisation on data.gov.au.
For more information, you can find Pia’s original post at the Department of Finance blog.