Linking Australian Government Data for Sustainability Science - A Case Study

Sustainability science has been viewed as a new discipline which focuses on the complex interactions between nature and society. It demands intensive integration of data from different sources within different domains. Governments collect and generate huge amounts of scientific data and thus are in a unique position to support sustainability research. However, there are many challenges in discovering and re-using government data. In this chapter, first, we survey the sustainability related datasets published by the Australian government. We believe this is the critical first step to identifying the opportunities and issues and advancing the Australian Government 2.0 agenda. Second, we investigate the role of Linked Data in integrating a selection of Australian government datasets to generate sustainability science hypotheses and support the data analysis.We discuss the challenges based on our survey experience and present some recommendations for data publishing and analysis.