This dashboard tracks our progress towards the goals of the policy which is for more public sector organisations to release more data. The dashboard also measures how well we are doing on open licensing, metadata completeness, and use of machine-readable formats.
Practical limitations mean we can only track and report on data that is discoverable through data.wa.gov.au. So, while an agency may already have published information through their own website, if it hasn’t been published with the appropriate metadata on data.wa.gov.au we aren’t able to include it in this dashboard.
It is required that all public sector data have an accompanying metadata statement recorded in the Data WA catalogue. This helps with discovery of data, irrespective if the data is hosted in Data WA, harvested from the original site or publicly available.
In designing these measures, we have tried to retain a balance between measures that are simple and easy to understand and the nuances inherent in publishing government information. We hope we have struck the right balance but do acknowledge there are some shortcomings – for example, most library collections and archival materials are never going to be machine-readable.
This dashboard remains a work in progress and will continue to be improved and refined over time. We’d love to hear any feedback you have about what the dashboard is telling you (or what it isn’t) and on the quality of the measures we’re using.