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Australia In Review (AIR) takes all relevant data sets for the last 40 years to create a holistic snapshot of what life was like for Australians that year presented in a dynamic infographic format. We also wanted to allow people to compare changes over time or between specific years.

There are so many different areas and aspects of the government that remain not only inaccessible but too complex to interpret for the average person.

The goals of the AIR Project are:

1) To present a beautiful, rich, social and interactive visualisation of that data for users to explore, share and enjoy.

2) To create a simple to use API endpoint for the general public to access a wide cross section of data for a given year.

Datasets Utilised:

National Surplus / Deficit (ABS/data.gov.au)
Budget Breakdown (ABS/data.gov.au)
List of Prime Ministers and Parties (National Archives)
Images of Prime Ministers (Trove)
Age Group Demographics by Sex (ABS)
Religion (ABS)
Migration (Dept. Immigration and Citizenship)
Births / Deaths (ABS)
Population Growth Rate (ABS - GRIM)
Housing Prices (ABS)
Household Income (ABS)
CPI (data.gov.au)
Employment By Sector (ABS)
Newspaper Headlines and Images (National Archives/Trove/Wikipedia)
All of these data sets after processing are available using our API.

The AIR Project can be viewed here: http://www.bradandglen.com/govhack/

Technical Triumphs

We came to GovHack expecting to see lovely RESTful API's of data that we could query, cache, mash and manipulate however we wanted. Unfortunately reality did not meet up to that expectation, but we realise now that that's why we're here!

The greatest technical challenge for our team was to obtain a large cross section of data from various different sources / systems and time periods that we could then manipulate into a consistent format for use with our project.

Having eventually achieved this late last night, we decided, in the spirit of Open Government / GovHack to make this data available via a simple (and simple to use) API that's available from the Australia In Review site as JSON.

Design & UX Challenges

As we were designing and building on the fly using agile methods, the trickiest part was analysing the data and determining what parts of it to highlight and expand on when used in context with all our other data visuals.

We drew upon our experience in advertising and data research along with a few years spent in web design to help us achieve the complete visual set while having to change a few sets as we went.

We had to make sure, at the end of the day, that each data presented was adding to the overall snapshot of Australia for that given year without making it too complex or hard to understand. We think we've managed to achieve this balance.

The AIR Project can be viewed here: http://www.bradandglen.com/govhack/

Project Members:

• atomic51 (admin)