The Location Index: a missing piece of Australian data integration infrastructure

The Data Integration Partnership for Australia (DIPA) focuses on maximising the effective use of data to improve policy advice, primarily through integrating data from a range of sources and domains. The Location Index, or Loc-I, has been a missing piece of Australian data integration infrastructure. Using location as a common linking feature, it will enable government agencies and other users to geospatially integrate and analyse data reliably, effectively and efficiently across portfolios, users and information domains. Location can be described and used to spatially enable data in a number of different ways. Street address is useful for service delivery; land parcels for revenue raising and investment; coordinates and grids for positioning and monitoring changes in the landscape; various administrative boundaries for service management and law enforcement; statistical geographies for a range of socio-economic data. Location Index provides the mechanism to bring together socio-economic, statistical and environmental data. Using linked Open Data infrastructure, Location Index will deliver agreed and consistent ways to represent, translate and connect different methods of referencing location across government and other data resources. It will benefit users who access and integrate data in three key areas. Firstly, reducing costs through enabling fast and easy access, and providing stable, persistent and repeatable location integration. Secondly, increasing use through reducing complexity and improving interoperability across datasets. Thirdly, improving decision making through increasing access to trusted data and providing transparent data integration methods. This talk will discuss the Location Index, the partnerships, objectives, methods, and implementation.