Contributing data

If you are interesting in making your data available for others to use please get in touch via the contact form.

Please note that Ballarat Open Data is not designed to be a repository of data or a hosting provider, it is a catalog of datasets available throughout the community. To share your data it will need to stored/published elsewhere.

In order to make data as useful, we aim to provide as much information about the data as possible. This typically includes:

• Keywords describing the data
• The time period covered
• The geographic area it applies to
• How the data was collected
• How/if the data was manipulated
• What the each field in the dataset means
• Contact details for the author and/or maintainer of the data
• Usage/licensing requirements

Best practices

Ballarat Open Data subscribes to the FAIR principles. While this might be a bit jargon-heavy, it's not as complex as it can seem. It is important to note that FAIR is based on best-effort and welcomes any improvements to use findability / usability of data. I.e. there isn't a minimum threshold for compliance, however your can assess your dataset for "FAIRness" if you wish!

• Findable - This is about ensuring the information about the data is descriptive and that the web address used to access to be data is as permanent (as it can be)
• Accessible - This is about making the data available using standardised open protocols. This makes it easier for computers to interact with data it makes the way data is received more predictable.
• Interoperable - This is about making the data available using standard formats. This makes it easier for people / computers to use the data as each dataset doesn't need to be translated independent of others.
• Reusable - This is about making licensing and usage requirements clear as well as providing information and how the data was collected / generated so that future users of the data can be confident in doing so