By Soul Solutions on
Friday, 14 October 2011
This week we were able to expand TransHub to 7 cities – now including Canberra. We were able to do this because the dataset for Canberra became available on data.gov.au.
Just over 5 years ago we saw the first campains to “Free Our Data” in the UK. Governments in every country collect and hold a massive amount of data, much of it very useful in our everyday lives, and quite often data you have to pay to get hold of and not necessarily in a particularly useful format. The idea behind this campaign was the Governments should collect the best quality data possible and then make it available for free to all.
In recent years there has been a push for Australian government agencies to make more data available to the public. Since then Data.Gov.Au has been created.
Data.gov.au provides an easy way to find, access and reuse public datasets from the Australian Government and state and territory governments. The main purpose of the site is to encourage public access to and reuse of government data by providing it in useful formats and under open licences.
The great thing about putting up the data so the public can use it, is that developers, businesses and hobbyists can use the data and mash it up in ways that were never before thought of and...
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