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.

The Foundation Spatial Data Framework (FSDF) is a framework of ten national authoritative geographic data themes that supports evidence-based social-economic decision making across multiple levels of Australian and New Zealand government agencies, industry, research and the community. The AAA data management principles (Authoritative, Accurate and Accessible), articulated for FSDF, are easily translatable to the FAIR Principles and applied to ensure: - Ability to Find data through rich and consistently implemented metadata; - Access to metadata and data by humans and machines while practicing federated data management within trusted data repositories; - Interoperability of metadata and data through adoption of common standards and application of best practices; and - Reusability of data by capturing licencing constraints and information about its quality and provenance. The Location Information Knowledge Platform (LINK) was developed in 2016 as a digital catalogue of FSDF content. This governed, online, dynamic, analysis and discovery tool was designed to enhance the discovery of FSDF datasets, support work planning and indicate the legal frameworks, agency priorities and use case associated with FSDF data. More than 73 Australian government agencies and commercial organisations use this Platform. Current work includes: - Building common high-level and individual lower-level information models (ontologies) for the FSDF and each dataset; - Development of a new architecture for persistent identifiers and identifier incorporation in the datasets; - The ISO 19115-1-based Australian and New Zealand Metadata profile and best practices user guides; and - Testing new workflows for metadata and data governance and integration utilising a set of common cloud-based infrastructure. On realisation, the FSDF will become a necessary component of spatial socio-economic decision making across Australian and New Zealand government agencies and the private sector. FSDF will encourage cross-sector partnerships and enable seamless access to authoritative spatial data across organisational and jurisdictional boundaries, thus contributing to economic growth, improved public safety, meeting legal and policy obligations and sustaining business needs.

The Great Artesian Basin Research Priorities Workshop, organised by Geoscience Australia (GA), was held in Canberra on 27 and 28 April 2016. Workshop attendees represented a spectrum of stakeholders including government, policy, management, scientific and technical representatives interested in GAB-related water management. This workshop was aimed at identifying and documenting key science issues and strategies to fill hydrogeological knowledge gaps that will assist federal and state/territory governments in addressing groundwater management issues within the GAB, such as influencing the development of the next Strategic Management Plan for the GAB. This report summarises the findings out of the workshop.