Thursday, June 6, 2013

East coast unanimously frees data

The NSW state government has joined QLD, Vic and ACT counterparts declaring support for open data initiative. It has just released a draft open data policy which aims to make state-owned data available to the public at no charge. Where is it not possible to provide data totally free of charge, it will be provided “at a reasonable price”. If the policy is approved, datasets will be available for download from www.data.nsw.gov.au portal.

If declarations of state and territory governments prove fruitful, we soon should have roads and cadastre/address data freely available for the eastern part of Australia - unless I totally misinterpret the intension of the open data policies. The move to free access to government data started 12 years ago with the release of Spatial Data Access and Pricing Policy however, the benefits have been slow coming. Hopefully, the momentum will now accelerate as more and more government organisations open up their data vaults.

Govhack 2013 initiative gives a taste of what can be done with all that free data. The winners have just been announced… 


First spotted on Spatialsource.com.au

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