Australian Research Data

Research Data Australia, the flagship service of the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), provides a comprehensive window into the Australian Research Data Commons. The site acts as a portal or catalogue describing Australian data collections, and includes over 40000 collections from a wide range of contributers covering a wide range of subjects, including Austrlian history, society and economics. The data includes details of projects receiving Australian Research Council funding, so is a useful starting off point ofr a wide range of research.

Research Data Australia is described as an Internet-based discovery service designed to provide rich connections between data, projects, researchers and institutions, and promote visibility of Australian research data collections in search engines. ANDS seeks to bring about four transformations to data - unmanaged to managed, disconnected to connected, invisible to findable and single use to reusable - that will enable Australia's research data to become a national strategic resource to support better, more efficient and defensible research, and improved policy input. ANDS is funded by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and the Education Investment Fund (EIF) Super Science Initiative.

Open Data - a New Zealand site of interest

Opengovt.org.nz is an open, independent catalogue of Government and Local Body datasets.

 

Open Data is an attempt to collate the many different datasets available through New Zealand Government Departments and Local Bodies. The work stems from discussions at the Perspectives on Open Data: Workshop on the Re-use of Government-held Non-personal Data which was held during Webstock 2009. The aims of the site are to:

• List all of the datasets available to members of the public.
• Provide a place for people to comment on the datasets (what’s good about them, bad, uses they have.)
• Make it easy for people to find the information they are after and who they need to contact.
• Provide a voice for the data using community, both professional and casual

While a recent initiative the site already has some interesting data sets available, and holds promise for much more top be avail;able in the future - examples of datasets currently made available include:

• The NZ Police list of designated terrorist individuals and organisations
• The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Limited's National Climate Database
• The Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited's data on Earthquake Hypocentres, and their Geological Maps
• Landcare Research New Zelaand's National Vegetation Survey (NVS) Databank
• Fire Incident summary date from the NZ Fire Service Commission
• Hydro lake level data from the Electricity Commission
• Treasury data including the Fiscal Time Series - Historical Fiscal Indicators 1972-2008; the Monthly Economic Indicators; and the New Zealand Debt Management Office Data
• Census data and Energy Use 2002-2005 Report tables from Statistics New Zealand
• The National Broadband Map
• New Zealand Book Covers (sadly only licensed for use within New Zealand)
• Data Tables for Coal, Electricity, Gas and for Oil
• The Annual Residential and Commercial Electricity Price Survey
• Authoritative Streets and Names (ASP)
• The New Zealand Gazetteer of Official Geographic Names
• New Zealand Map Grid (NZMG) Non Geo-referenced Orthophotos
• New Zealand Place Names Database (Archived), and
• Scanned Marine Charts