For the last year we have been working with Data61 on the next stage of
data.gov.auYou can find the alpha version at
search.data.gov.auIts still an early version of the software but we wanted to make something available early and test our assumptions
One of the core things we wanted to achieve was to take the things we learned from NationalMap
Key amongst that was the agnosticism of source
We decided to approach the new
data.gov.au as a search engine for data rather than a data catalogue
The new
data.gov.au connects to more catalogues than ever before
And as a result you can now find around 64,000 datasets available
We also wanted to make searching easier so we introduced the beginnings of a semantic search by letting use operators like by, as, from and to
And like all good search engines we have done some work to introduce a ranking algorithm the new search weights results based around 5 star open data.
We are working towards being able to add even more data sources and better integration with data visualisation tools like the NationalMap.
Like NationalMap the new search is based on completely open source software.