Growth and Collaboration in the Atlas of Living Australia

Abstract

Over the past three years, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), a data infrastructure in its own right and the Australian node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), has been both enjoying both rapid growth (now with over 50 employees covering a broad project portfolio), and maturing as an organisation with formal processes in place for strategy and workplan development, project management and planning. Having recently upgraded our core infrastructure to align with GBIF and now sharing a code base for our data ingestion pipelines, we have been working on extending the occurrence data model with a focus on ecological survey sites and events and will continue to participate in the development of GBIF's diversified data model. We have been developing a framework with our jurisdictional agencies for managing restricted data, which will see us develop our Sensitive Data Service to handle a broader range of data sensitivity scenarios than the current system, which obfuscates by species rules only, whereas there are requirements to manage sensitivity at the levels of dataset, provider or location. We have begun a cross-agency project for aggregating genomic data for Australian species from multiple platforms, and a new technical roadmap will guide us as we redevelop and modernise our suite of web services and applications. This presentation will give a very brief overview of our current major project work, relating it to our stated strategies to deliver trusted data and robust services, partner for impact, and support decision making.