Semantic Web and Data Resources

⁠⁠⁠The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) is a new department that has been established to deliver on the Government’s climate change and energy agenda and protect Australia’s environment and water resources.

The Environment Data and Analytics Branch (EDAB) within DCCEEW helps manage and analyze environmental and biodiversity data and information to enable evidence-based policy, decision-making and reporting.

The Biodiversity Information Section within EDAB is assembling a comprehensive, standardized, defensible national-scale biodiversity data asset (the Biodiversity Data Repository, BDR) to inform biodiversity decision-making, policy development, planning and reporting, by government, industry and the community. The BDR is being built as an RDF Knowledge Graph to enable it to become a Linked Data national asset.

The BDR project requires a supplier with deep skills around Semantic Data and Knowledge Graph principles. The supplier will have a deep understanding of RDF (Resource Description Framework, a W3C standard), semantic methods, ontologies and biodiversity data.

The supplier will have excellent skills in:

• Data governance
• Data modelling
• System design and implementation
• Knowledge graph Vocabularies/taxonomies
• use of the Ontotext graphDB product

The supplier will be required to:

• Update and maintain an RDF database, initially within an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud tenancy managed by one of the BDR project’s vendors, with a future option to migrate the system to the department’s MS Azure cloud tenancy.
• Work with multiple jurisdictions to import a set of existing RDF data (c. 30M records) in the form of ttl files from a previous pilot project.
• Ensure conformance of imported records with an existing semantic standard (the Australian Biodiversity Information Standard, ABIS; https://ausbigg.github.io/abis/specification.html).
• Work with department IT staff to ensure data privacy, security and compliance with cyber security standards and best practice.
• Work with project partners to establish protocols for secure data ingestion.
• Provide advice on and help design systems for curating, accessing and using BDR data.
• Share knowledge and help train department IT staff in RDF and semantic methods.
• Build on previous work undertaken for the BDR Project.

Estimated start date: Monday, 25 March 2024

Initial contract duration: until 2 July 2024

Extension term: 6 months

Number of extensions: 2

Location of work: ACT, VIC, Offsite