At a glance
Overview
DES’s challenge
Following the successful build of the Queensland’s Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation open data catalogue (QESD), 32 potential enhancements remained in the backlog for review and implementation. QESD needed ongoing support that included platform enhancements.
DES’s transformation
The implementation of additional features provided a better user experience and added extra governance to ensure metadata was controlled.
The outcomes
- Successful hosting, maintenance and patching since go live in June 2021
- Implementation of a number of key features remaining from the initial build
- A better user experience
Full case study
DETSI’s challenge — providing a better user experience
During the initial site build, a number of features were deprioritised, and Queensland Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation was keen to revisit these features and implement those of value. A backlog of 32 items was reviewed and assessed for implementation. The main theme around these 32 features was providing a better user experience.
Internal business requirements drove the scoping of the issues to be ready for development.
DETSI’s transformation — ongoing hosting, support and key feature implementation
Salsa has been managing the hosting of the Queensland’s Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation data catalogue (QESD) since go-live in June 2021. During this time, the site has achieved over 99.8% service uptime. Salsa has also provided regular maintenance and patching for the latest CKAN releases.
The key features identified by QESD have been developed and implemented in collaboration with the QESD team.
Salsa worked closely with the QESD team to review all potential features in the backlog, prioritise them, and then work out implementation solutions. The new features ensure a better user experience and improved metadata controls.
Specific features include:
SOLR search — Adding additional metadata fields to the Solr search to search via facets, and providing documentation on performing advanced, specific searching within the schema.
Temporal coverage — Applying validation rules on temporal coverage start and end dates to ensure no overlap of dates when filtering search results. Also providing default values when dates are not provided by users.
Spatial coverage — Adding the ability to draw a dataset’s spatial coverage on the map, in addition to entering spatial coverage as coordinates.
Data services — Providing a view of the activity stream to users and removing the publishing tab.
Accessibility — Setting up keyboard shortcuts for access to accordions in the backend of the catalogue to ensure compliance with the global WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards.
User dashboard — Providing authenticated users with a dashboard view of the datasets they’re following.
User experience — A number of features were implemented, including providing Help Tips throughout the site, extra features to audit reports, content fixes, the addition of an hourglass image during page load, and highlighting mandatory fields more clearly on metadata input forms.
Controlled vocabularies — Ensuring metadata schema fields use a vocabulary service name and providing a warning for missing data.
API — Adding additional validation rules to the existing interface to ensure API behaviour is consistent with the website.
Data export — Adding functionality to allow metadata records to be exported in RDF format.
Quality measure — Providing an overall quality measure score to each dataset based on accessibility, accuracy, coherence, institutional environment and interpretability.
The outcomes — extra solutions for all users
Successful hosting, maintenance and patching since go live in June 2021
Implementation of a number of key features remaining from the initial build
A better user experience
The ability to export data in multiple formats so that dataset metadata can be imported into other systems
Contextual help information so that users can access information easily when creating and editing metadata records
About Queensland Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation (DETSI)
The Queensland Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation is a diverse organisation with responsibilities in areas of environment, parks and forests, science and technology, as well as the arts. Some of DETSI’s key responsibilities include:
Protecting and managing Queensland’s parks, forests and the Great Barrier Reef
Enhancing Queensland’s ecosystems
Preventing, minimising or mitigating the impacts to the environment
Leading the development of environmental science strategy for government
Delivering scientific expertise to protect and manage our environment
Supporting the development of Queensland’s science sector