The challenge
The Queensland Government is an Australian leader in making open data available to the public.
Despite having a huge amount of data available on the data.qld.gov.au website, it can be difficult for users to access the information they want.
For instance, to access the Queensland Government’s departmental expenditure data, a user would have to download 23 separate annual reports, flick through the pdf to find the financial statements and transfer that data to a format that they could work with.
The Queensland Government publishes all of the grants and contract it awards. However, a user wanted to find out who was receiving those awards in a given year, they would need to download over 300 spreadsheets rife with inconsistent data and then individually search them.