A chat-bot for navigating VicGov spatial data

Making data accessible is about much more than shoving it on a website; data needs to be understandable and user-friendly. Government should meet users where they are at, not demand you scale great mountains of jargon to reach our Rapunzel data. We live in an era of mass-personalisation and our data services should follow suit. Let’s have a conversation about our awesome data, to help you find and use it better. Let’s try and codify some of our expertise and serve this out to data users along with the data itself.

The Aim of this Challenge is to create a chatbot application that helps users find and understand open spatial data products, utilising the published metadata, product descriptions, FAQ’s, etc about the products but presenting it in a more conversational and user-directed way. It will help users – who might be researchers, students, other government personnel and policy people, application developers, and citizen-scientists - find and understand if data is fit-for-purpose for their needs.

While we have included links to Vicmap descriptions, teams should not feel constrained by this and are welcome to use any spatial datasets available from data.vic.gov.au