Dept. of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (Vic)
Victoria’s Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (formerly DELWP) has three state-wide monitoring and evaluation programs that examine the effects of water for the environment:
- In rivers (VEFMAP)
- In wetlands (WetMAP)
- On the floodplain (VMFRP)
Within these long-term monitoring programs, data users interact with a custom-built data management system that ESS designed and developed. The system provides quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) to ensure data collected is accurate and up-to-date.
This is achieved by configuring data standards within each system. All incoming data is compared against the standards and the rules are enforced. The data standards can enforce use of:
- Controlled vocabularies (e.g. species lists)
- Lookups of related standards (e.g. site lists)
- Standard data validation rules (e.g. required fields, accepted data types, numerical ranges)
Once standards are established, the workflow is:
- Users can submit a data file for acceptance by the system.
- A data quality report is provided back to the user submitting data, allowing them to correct any problems before it is accepted.
- All accepted data (old and new) gets stored and published into in a relational database that can be queried.
- Database queries can highlight complex QC issues (e.g. logical inconsistency across standards) and provide custom data products for output to users (e.g. aggregated species counts across seasons/regions).
To further enable and expose this content, DEECA have also worked with ESS to develop a data portal for sharing content from these three databases to end-users (e.g. Victorian CMAs). The portal offers a consistent platform for registered users to download data products that are generated directly from the three data management systems.
This solution integrates many features that are usually only possible via a combination of multiple data manipulation/validation/transformation/reporting products and platforms. This reduces the technical understanding required to achieve strong data enforcement and management and allows users to focus on their analysis.