Data Show Off Challenge
The Queensland Open Data portal (data.qld.gov.au) currently hosts over 2300 datasets from 21 Departments. The number of datasets along with visits to the website has increased consistently since the portal was first launched.
A survey of portal users in 2016 showed that around 25% would like to see better visualisations of data and around 30% would like to see an improvement in the quality of the data. The Open Data Institute Queensland (ODIQ), ODIQ conducted innovative public consultation "Open Data, Open Conversations". The consultation process provided the opportunity for a broad range of stakeholders to provide feedback via an online forum, an online social mapping tool and face-to-face deep dive workshops. Providing better visualisations of Queensland’s Open Data was one of the key findings from the consultations.
The Queensland Open Data portal is built using CKAN, an open-source data portal platform. It has some core functionality which can be enhanced through CKAN extensions that have been developed by an open-source community. Improving the presentation of the visuals and allowing for default visualisations will improve engagement and the overall experience for portal users.
The CKAN portal also has some functionality to enable API (Application Programming Interface) access to the dataset if its format and structure is of sufficient quality. This is also a prerequisite for the visualisation function to be enabled for the dataset.
Improving the visualisation to work with a datasets API will encourage data publishers to improve the quality of their data so that they can better engage with Open Data users via the visualisation.
The Challenge
To provide a more engaging way for users to interact with the Qld Government Open Data Portal. This may be working with the CKAN API to improve access to datasets and visualise the data. It may also provide a way to get insights from the datasets or the portal itself. For example:
- Providing better visualisation of data hosted on the portal, e.g. via CKAN API, csv data, etc
- Rating datasets e.g. by quality, openness, popularity, crowd sourced ratings, etc
- Improving the way users can search for data, e.g. federated searching with other portals, weighted results based on ratings/popularity, etc
- Insights into portal use, dataset quality, departmental performance, etc
- Show us new ways in which we can identify new data which we will find valuable in our day to day business.
This challenge is about providing insights into the data that Queensland Government publish in the most engaging way possible.
User/audience/target market
State, local government, community housing providers, private enterprise and others.
Assessment and scoring
Submissions will be assessed on how well GovHackers meet the following criteria:
- Use of Qld Government data from data.qld.gov.au
- Addresses the components of the challenge
- Engaging, creative and visually appealing.
Datasets
To be eligible to win you must use:
- Data from Queensland Open Data portal
- Or interact with the portal via the CKAN API