Paddock to Reef Data Portal

The Queensland Water Modelling Network, in partnership with the Office of the Great Barrier Reef and Truii have created the Paddock to Reef Data Portal.

Once finalised later this year, the Paddock to Reef Data Portal will be a publicly accessible web-based data delivery platform. The Data Portal has been created to handle the common issues associated with data driven programs. Truii have used the Office of the Great Barrier Reef Paddock to Reef program as the basis for defining the functionality and use cases for the platform. The Paddock to Reef Data Portal is focused on delivering the data publishing and sharing needs of the Office of the Great Barrier Reef, however the platform has been created with a focus on being able to repurposed (rebranded and tailor) the platform for other data driven project teams or organisations.

The Paddock to Reef Data Portal has four major functionality areas:

• Publishing open data: Similar to open data platforms like data.qld.gov.au, the model data portal allows administrators to publish data and for public users to search, explore and download this data. The purpose of the publishing functionality is to provide easy access to commonly requested and appropriately deidentified program level data.

• Sharing data between users: Data driven projects require the continuous sharing of data. You are probably familiar with the chain of reply-all emails with updated file versions. The Data Portal allows sharing of files and folders (similar to dropbox) by team members. The key difference from other sharing applications is that data lineage is maintained. Users can see and revert to previous versions in a files’ history, or at least track the changes. In practical terms this means that the history of the four shp files that define the model elements is captured.

• Custom queries: The Paddock to Reef program catchment modelling team deal with around 100 data requests per year. Many of these requests are based on extracting and summarising content from the 11M rows of eWater Source Catchment model outputs across the entire Great Barrier Reef modelling domain. The custom query functionality of the Data Portal allows users to create their own custom data extraction query.

What’s next?

The tool is complete, and is going through the processes of internal testing and approval to allow it to be released publicly. The generic nature of the tool means that the Data Portal can be repurposed (rebranded and tailored) for other data driven project teams or organisations.