Geoscience Australia: developing a data strategy to maximise the value of geoscientific and geospatial data to ensure Australia’s economic and political future

Development of a data policy and ensuring its uptake is not a trivial task within any organisation. There are many surrounding factors that may help or hinder the acceptance and imbedding of policies. Preparation and development of Geoscience Australia’s (GA) Data Strategy and Data Stewardship Policy required a combined understanding and knowledge of political, stakeholder, geoinformatics and technological landscapes external to the organisation, and an internal understanding of a vast amount of multi-disciplinary data assets and their champions within GA. Externally, from an international perspective, any data policy needs to take into account: - Regulations and compliance requirements (FAIR Principles and Trusted repositories), - Supporting data interoperability geoinformatics developments (common ontological information models, vocabularies and content standards (ISO, OGC, W3C)); - Technology trends (semantic web, machine learning, block chain); and - How these may interrelate to each other. From an Australian perspective, any GA data policy must: - Maintain a high level awareness of changes in Government priorities and policies (Australian Government Data Policy, Digital Continuity 2020); - Similar developments within other Government organisations; - Understand GA stakeholders and their roles in supporting delivery of GA goals and outcomes: the influencers, partners and consumers and how GA can communicate its Data Policy to them. Internally, to ensure the Strategy implementation, GA needs to: - Build a strong support base from executives, managers and data champions to ensure adoption of the strategy and funding; - Develop an architecture to sustain the implementation; - Ensure technological support through expert geoinformatics and Multi-Disciplinary-Teams; - Educate staff to ensure they have adequate competencies to comply with the policy. The GA Data Strategy is accompanied by a three year roadmap, which includes developing methodologies and frameworks to: - Streamline data processes, systems and tools; - Embed best practice data management; - Encourage and reward data management; - Develop data capabilities; - Strengthen and embed Data Governance. Realisation of this work is essential for GA to achieve its main goal of maximising geoscientific data potential to serve Australia.