In July, the ODI Membership Team spoke to ODI Member Link Digital’s Executive Director, Steven De Costa, to find out what they’ve been up to…

Based in Australia, Link Digital is a global open information technology company that helps its clients make meaningful change with open data. Since 2012, Link Digital has been developing solutions based on the world’s leading open-source data portal platform: CKAN.

CKAN is an open-source data management system for powering data hubs and data portals. It allows organisations, governments and communities to easily publish, share and use data.

Following the ODI from the start

Steven and the Link Digital team discovered the ODI back in 2013 at the Open Knowledge Festival in Berlin. They were intrigued by the organisation and its mission. “We’ve always found the ODI to be a fascinating organisation,” says Steven. “It’s great that government actors can come to the ODI and receive help advancing certain initiatives.”

“We became an ODI Member because we value being part of a wider ecosystem.”

Current projects

“At Link Digital, we work on a variety of open data projects. In the Australian context, these are provincial open data platforms. We manage five of the eight states and territories’ portals. We’re also working on the national portal in Australia, data.gov.au.

“Link Digital also works on agency data sharing projects. In the resources sector, we have the Geoscience Data Modernisation Project (GDMP) for the Geological Survey of Queensland (GSQ) – we’ve helped them catalogue their exploration data. The GSQ collects data on drill sampling and boreholes, then they catalogue what comes out of the earth and make it available for the public to explore remotely.

“The most complex build that we’re working on at the moment is the Pacific Data Hub. It is a CKAN data portal which has a Drupal component to it, and has stories with data attached to it as content items. It also has a spatial preview for spatial-oriented data sets using TerriaJS, developed by Australian digital research network, Data61, which is a cool tool.”

The data landscape in Australia

“Data projects in Australia are at different levels across the country. At a federal level, there are big data projects that are important to the whole country. If the projects relate to the resourcing sector, agribusiness, biodiversity or land use, then the requirements can be expansive – it all comes down to geography and demography.

“The rest of 2022 will be about project management and increasing engagement in this process.

“We’re working to see if we can improve CKAN to improve its flexibility, adaptability and integral integration opportunities for our customers. This creates opportunities for us to engage with our customers even further.”

Challenges

“I think everyone in the sector faces similar challenges. Data projects are often launched with a great deal of fanfare, ambition and political winds.

“There is not always a great deal of follow through in terms of budgets, which is why you need strong advocacy at the political level. You also need good practitioners at a programme level.

“A data project is not core business to a government department or agency, and is often sidelined. We find that our customers are either underfunded or under-supported within their own agencies.”

Strong data management outcomes

“We’ve worked on national portals – we’re working with the government of Saudi Arabia at the moment. These are the projects that are more politically-oriented and underfunded.

“When it comes to a sector-specific portal, there is usually a strong data management outcome that comes from that, they’re usually better funded and supported. People can understand the value of what’s going to be coming out of their programmes. There is great value in the output of these programs. They are excellent projects to work on.

“An example of this is the Canadian Watershed Information Network (CanWIN). It is well-supported because it helps a wide group of stakeholders enable the outcomes of a number of different research projects.

“Similarly, within the resource sector, we have a climate data portal in New South Wales that has supercomputer facilities to produce simulations and projections of the future. These projects are good because they’re linked to policy – they’re not just on the sidelines.”