Unlocking Australia’s Data: Connecting Trusted National Datasets with the Digital Atlas of Australia

When people need authoritative geospatial data, they often face a familiar frustration: multiple versions of the same dataset, unclear ownership, and no easy way to know which source is current and reliable. This fragmentation slows decision-making and duplicates effort across government.

Geoscience Australia created the Digital Atlas of Australia to solve this problem. This cloud-enabled, federated system connects and provides access to trusted national datasets from across the country. “The vision that we have for the Digital Atlas of Australia is to support smarter decisions by making data not just available, but truly usable,” said Maree Wilson, chief of Geoscience Australia’s Places and Communities Division.

The Digital Atlas operates through two main environments. The first is a secure, access-controlled space where government agencies—federal, state, and local—collaborate and create content, even without advanced geographic information system (GIS) skills. The second is a public portal where anyone can explore spatial datasets, including demographic information and historical and current imagery, using built-in visualization tools.

This dual structure serves both technical experts and everyday users. It encourages exploration and sharing while safeguarding the integrity of official data.

Geoscience Australia leads the development and delivery of the Digital Atlas on behalf of the Australian government. The agency provides the infrastructure and works with data custodians to curate, connect, and share their content. Custodians maintain control of their data. The Geoscience Australia team does not copy or duplicate what custodians choose to share. This approach builds trust and encourages agencies to make their data available.

Distributed collaboration is an important component of the Digital Atlas. Built on ArcGIS Enterprise, the system allows multiple organizations to securely share maps, layers, and other GIS content. Everyone works from the same up-to-date information, as explained in this short video.

Distributed collaboration creates a trusted connection between ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online environments, making shared content discoverable and easy to use across systems. Agencies with existing GIS systems can link their data directly. Other agencies create connections to the end points of datasets they want to share. Referencing that end point—rather than uploading a copy—means users always access the authoritative, current version of the data.

This is the same mechanism ArcGIS uses when integrating external datasets through web APIs, public URLs, and cloud services. Users can read and use data directly from the source.

This approach transformed how new datasets are added. Initially, staff had to reach out to custodians, check data quality, and manage metadata manually. Now, distributed collaboration and feature services enable the governance and processes that ensure the quality, reliability, and usability of content in the Digital Atlas. These same processes allow custodians to share data quickly and reliably.

Live referencing and scheduled updates keep dynamic datasets current. Static datasets refresh regularly. The result is a more sustainable, scalable model for national data sharing—one that reduces duplication, protects ownership, and ensures everyone works from the same source of truth.

With many partners contributing data, strong governance is essential. Geoscience Australia has established a clear framework that defines roles and responsibilities, sets data standards, and guides how information moves through its life cycle. These practices help data custodians understand when to add, update, or retire content, supporting the Digital Atlas’s long-term reliability and sustainability.

Regular email updates share information with registered users of the secure government environment about outages, upgrades, and new features. Each ArcGIS Enterprise release gets a brief news story highlighting changes and how users can benefit. This communication helps government users stay confident in the system and encourages them to take advantage of new capabilities as they become available.

System upgrades follow a structured, carefully planned process. The team tests changes in staging environments, schedules releases outside business hours, and performs regular backups to protect information. They conduct routine checks and maintain a mirrored test environment to ensure performance and security. ArcGIS Monitor supports real-time system health monitoring.

Today, the Digital Atlas hosts hundreds of datasets from trusted sources across the government. Distributed collaboration and feature services have made data integration faster and more sustainable. Geoscience Australia continues to improve the Digital Atlas, strengthen partnerships, and enhance backup and recovery processes. A key goal is expanding collaboration across government agencies.

The system is already helping departments spatially enable their data to make it easier to access and use by location. The Australian Government Department of Social Services has moved their data from spreadsheets to maps and interactive dashboards. They combine data on support payments with population data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to inform place-based decisions for communities.

An interagency task force focused on preparedness efforts for H5N1 high pathogenicity avian influenza (H5 bird flu) has also used the secure sharing and collaboration capabilities to support their work. The Digital Atlas ensured the task force could access the same current, reliable data on wildlife, agriculture, and human health and visualize it on a map. This helped them understand the risk and prepare to respond quickly if a case is detected.

The Digital Atlas of Australia demonstrates how enterprise GIS and distributed collaboration can unlock national data, making it accessible, useful, and sustainable. As Maree Wilson put it: “In a connected world, collaboration is our greatest capability, and location is our common language.”