Over the past two decades, governments around the world have come under increasing pressure to open their data as much as possible. There is widespread agreement that doing so can bring huge benefits to society by fostering innovation, improving transparency, and driving improvements in public services.  

And yet while Australia has made great strides in the open data space, there is room for improvement. 

In our latest white paper, we look at the state of government data in 2023: assessing what has worked well, and where there is work still to be done. We also look at how the right tools and technology can help truly unleash the power of open data. 

One of those essential tools is having the right confidentiality solution in place to enable the release of datasets that might otherwise have been deemed too difficult or sensitive to publish. Often these are the more interesting and useful datasets where they are huge potential benefits to be realised if that data can be made available more widely.  

At WingArc Australia, we have been helping government departments, statistical agencies, and private organisations all over the world to explore and publish data easily and safely since the 1980s.  

SuperWEB2, our web-based data-dissemination platform, is designed to give end users very flexible, self-service access to large and complex datasets. Users can effectively ask any question they like and the tool tabulates the query on-the-fly from the underlying unit records to return the aggregated results. At the same time, our built-in cell key perturbation algorithm works to protect the confidentiality of the individuals in that data. 

Our Open Data API enables that data to be re-used and re-purposed by industry and the community as the foundation of apps, services, visualisations, and other integrations. 

Here in Australia, we work closely with several government agencies, including the Australian Bureau of Statistics who disseminate census data to the people of Australia through TableBuilder, which is powered by SuperWEB2. Around the world, from South Africa to Europe, we help to deliver vital public data to the people. In the UK, for example, the Department for Work and Pensions (which has a similar role to Centrelink, and is responsible for welfare payments, child maintenance and the state pension), uses SuperWEB2 to publish many millions of records across hundreds of datasets. Many of those datasets contain highly sensitive data about the individuals receiving those payments. The DWP system, rebranded by the department as Stat-Xplore, is used extensively by other UK government agencies, researchers, and the general public. It is widely regarded as a strong success story for transparency and Open Data in the UK. 

Fill in the form below to download the white paper: The State of Open Data.