Brisbane City Council launches open data datastore
Brisbane City Council has released an open data public sector information datastore, allowing the community to access and reuse a range of council data under Creative Commons licensing.
While not the first council in Australia to do this (with Mosman City Council leading the pack), Brisbane is the first large metropolitan council in Australia to do so to my knowledge, joining a range of cities across North America and Europe.
Brisbane has launched the datastore with the Hack:Brisbane competition and is hosting an upcoming Hackfest next Saturday to stimulate usage of their information.
Hopefully other major cities across Australia will look at what Brisbane is doing and consider its value in their own jurisdictions.
Surprisingly; I found http://data.gov.au/dataset/grave-search-brisbane-city-council/ to be the best data set there in terms of general use.
Planning alerts already has decent coverage – http://www.planningalerts.org.au/authorities/brisbane/applications – so the only other bits left might be the geo data and open street map getting together.
Good on them none the less – most of the releases are well thought out and hackable.
This is good news to people.
Brisbane is going to lead the way in shipping off government data to china:
http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/government-it/bcc-plans-to-outsource-jobs-to-asia-source-says-20130106-2cba8.html
hooray! I always wanted the communists to know what I am doing:- where I am parking, where I live, exactly what sort of real estate I rent or own and yes… even the library books I read.