GovConnect

Team Name

Data Directory

Team Members

Project Description

GovConnect
The Issue: Data Overload
Every day, across Australia’s government agencies…
Thousands of datasets are published by the ABS, AIHW, ATO, Education Department and others.
Dozens of portals, dashboards, and APIs are created independently.
Vital insights (on health, education, economy, climate, social issues) are siloed and hard to find.
Even skilled researchers and policymakers struggle with “not knowing what they don’t know”—often overlooking critical data simply because it’s buried across fragmented sources.
So… how can communities, NGOs, policymakers, and journalists engage with open data if the information they need is spread out, inconsistent, and inaccessible?

GovConnect is the solution 🚀
GovConnect is an experimental tool designed to make Australia’s open government data landscape easier to navigate, search, and understand.

How it works:
Select
GovConnect ingests metadata from ABS and at least two other major data providers (AIHW, Education, ATO). Users simply enter a keyword or theme they want to explore.
Transform
GovConnect’s engine automatically connects related datasets, flags comparable time series, and highlights trends or significant changes (e.g., “Violence prevalence rates since 2016” or “Energy use by state over time”).
Personalise
Users can filter by domain (health, education, labour, climate), location, or timeframe. Relevant datasets are presented in an interactive dashboard with simple visuals and contextual notes (like confidence levels and RSE warnings).

Empowering Communities 🌏
This method of navigating government data is designed to:
Boost transparency by making open data easy to find and compare.
Empower citizens and organisations to use evidence in advocacy, decision-making, and reporting.
Build trust in open government services by reducing siloes and confusion.
Enable equitable access so that policymakers, NGOs, journalists, and everyday Australians can engage with evidence—not bureaucracy.

Technical Details ⚙️
Built with Python & FastAPI: Backend scrapes and serves metadata from multiple government sources.
Frontend : Interactive Analytics/web for searching, filtering, and visualising datasets.
Data Sources: ABS Data API, AIHW reports, Education/Employment stats, ATO data.
ETL Pipeline: Reads XLSX/CSV/API, cleans, and tags datasets with metadata (year, domain, RSE flags, significance markers).
Export Tools: One-click PDF report generation with charts, caveats, and source references.
Safety-first: Persistent support banner links to ABS metadata notes, ensuring correct interpretation of statistics.

What’s next? 🔮
Automating ingestion so GovConnect stays updated with every ABS/API release.
Expanding to all government datasets (state + federal) for a truly national inventory.
Adding topic subscriptions so users can get daily or weekly updates about new datasets relevant to their interest (e.g., “climate change”, “gender equality”).
Embedding AI-assisted insights (plain-English summaries of dataset meaning and change over time).

Try it out!
GovConnect is all about turning Australia’s fragmented data landscape into a single, navigable gateway:
Boosting Transparency: Making open data easier to find, compare, and use.
Empowering Citizens: Helping everyone make evidence-led decisions.
Open Source: Available on GitHub for anyone to extend and build upon.
🔗 Check out the GovConnect demo for a streamlined view of ABS and partner datasets!

Data Story

Open data is retrieved from the ABS Data API, AIHW reports, and Department of Education statistics. These datasets are published in CSV/XLSX or JSON formats and then ingested into GovConnect’s catalog. Metadata is cleaned and tagged so users can search by topic or agency, making it easy to surface the right dataset for their area of interest.