Sharing Data, Sharing Ideas
Slides will be available from presentions at the seminar.
Wednesday 21st May 2009
Knibbs Theatre, ABS House, Canberra
Notes from opening address.
I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners on whose land we are gathered. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and thank them for their ongoing contribution to our wonderful community here in Canberra.
I would also like to acknowledge Dr Stephen Ellis, Assistant Director-General, Operation and Preservation of the national Archive of Australia and Mr Michael Beahan, Assistant Secretary, Data Management, Australian Bureau of Statistics as representatives of the host organisations for today’s seminar.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be here to open the Sharing Data, Sharing Ideas – Metadata Seminar. It’s always a little intimidating to talk about metadata in front of room full of specialists in the field, so I am grateful for the introduction offering just a tiny little bit of cover: it seems I am the only one who has actually said the word ‘metadata’ in Parliament!
I have also been inspired by the opportunity I have be given to sit on the Advisory Council of the National Archive of Australia. This has opened my eyes further to the policy challenges of the digital revolution, not to mention the practical challenges.
But I can assure you, there is reason to be confident that the Government understands its responsibility for digital infrastructure. We can already see the evidence of this in both new public policy and legislative change.
Not least being the national broadband network which will close, once and for all the digital divide. This network will facilitate access to open information and services that will transform the way we live our lives and how we communicate with each other.
In essence, digital infrastructure is infrastructure for the social revolution that inevitably follows a period of technological revolution. This social revolution will be facilitated characterised by far greater access to information and the proliferation of services delivered digitally via the internet.
The Government has an important role to play to establish principles of openness in both standards and culture. In his recent speech launching information awareness month, Senator Faulkner discussed how “Agencies must be capable of moving towards a culture of openness where information is generally made available as a matter of course rather than when explicitly required. More effective, holistic management of information across government is a key to realising this outcome.” Minister Faulkner
Applying high quality metadata is a key performance indicator for achieving the policy approach the Minister describes. (While he doesn’t use the actual word, ‘metadata’,) his words point to the use of and compliance with the open record keeping metadata standard as being one the ‘effective, holistic’ it management tools across government.
You know better than any other group of people the importance of metadata to tracking and understanding data. I believe that now is your time.
If we, the government, are going to be able to tackle the substantive challenges of our time including making our social support systems effective in helping those in need, we need to be able to turn the vast wealth of public sector information into knowledge. Again Minister Faulkner has been making this point:
“Income redistribution through taxation and welfare, the provision of education, the pursuit of public health initiatives, the fight against climate change are just a few of the many public policy initiatives that depend on the government’s capacity to gain, analyse and deploy information.” Minister Faulkner.
Metadata facilitates this access and analysis. It helps us enrich our knowledge and therefore better serve the citizens of the country. It enables policy decisions to be contextualised and that means better informed decisions.
To enable better informed policy making and program delivery, information needs to be able to be continuously validated and of course, available for perpetuity in the future. This is where open standards can ensure the sustainability of data.
Open access to public sector information facilitates innovation across government, but this opportunity to innovate and value-add can extend to the private sector too, provided the information is available in the first place. A good example is the availability of geo-spatial data held by the Commonwealth. I believe that this data ought to be in the public domain and I encourage my colleagues to take the next step in this regard.
I also want to briefly talk about two types of metadata as examples of some on the challenges of the future: object metadata, including author, date, geospatial information, and other descriptive terms can help create a richer metadata collection for government, for example something as straightforward as including the geocode where relevant.
The other type I want to mention is relational metadata. How data interrelates across a range of media is something we are grappling with in my office right now and we move into a social networking environment. It’s complicated, and that is for an itty bitty of data compared to the amount of data you work with.
This is more important than ever as government continues to explore its capacity to have meaningful interactions with citizens in an online, social networking environment. Relational metadata is being created through blogs, facebook and twitter and it is easy to manipulate, so understanding it is extremely important.
I will do my part to represent the needs and issues in this area to my colleagues in Government, to help ensure informed and appropriate policy and government leadership in this area.
I would like to thankyou for your contribution to information management to date and wish you well in your considerations at this Seminar.
Thank you for asking me to provide the opening address this morning.
- Stephen Ellis NAA, Michael Beahan ABS, Senator Kate Lundy and Michelle Berkhout
