Australia invests significant resources in environmental data acquisition, management and publication. Although data are abundant, users are typically hampered by an inability to discover, access and re-use the data. The National Environmental Information Infrastructure (NEII) activity will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of discovering, accessing and re-using environmental data beyond its primary purpose. The NEII is envisioned as a federation of environmental data nodes adopting common standards to create a data infrastructure with an initial focus on nationally significant environmental data. Its primary focus is on the discovery and re-use of national environmental data that is already well-managed, but that currently has limited application beyond its original business purpose. In common with spatial data infrastructures, the NEII encompasses common data models, exchange formats and standard network protocols along with centralised catalogues of uniform metadata descriptions. It also includes standardised models for describing environmental measurements, monitoring sites and methods used to observe the environment to address the unique requirements of environmental information. These architectural elements are more fully described in the NEII Reference Architecture (Bureau of Meteorology, 2014b, www.neii.gov.au). The Bureau of Meteorology is leading the development of the NEII including provision of core coordination and integration infrastructure, as well as the governance and collaboration framework for its development and operation. However its ongoing success is dependent on establishing enduring partnerships with major national environmental information organisations. The NEII Programme is framed around five focus areas including (a) Communication, (b) Engagement, (c) Policies and frameworks, (d) Data management, and (e) ICT build. This paper provides a more detailed overview of one component of the Data Management area regarding the development of the NEII Conformance Framework. Conformance means following established guidelines, specifications and standards or working towards them. A conformance framework is a structured set of guidelines that detail the levels at which a participant provides services that comply with the NEII architecture. The NEII Conformance Framework has been developed to (a) enable partners to set priorities against specific expectations that will jointly lead to developing a sustainable federated environmental information system; (b) enable users of the NEII to rapidly assess the suitability of data for their business needs; and (c) provide a common measurement system to monitor progress in the development of the NEII. The framework adopts a capability maturity model approach to describe the steady improvement required for NEII nodes to progress from a basic data release (experimental data service with limited operational support) to an enduring federated system providing environmental information. The design of the model is informed by other maturity-based approaches for open data such as the Open Data Institute's certification approach (Open Data Institute 2015). The paper also presents a worked example of the conformance framework against the Bureau of Meteorology's Australian Hydrologic Geospatial Fabric NEII data services. The paper concludes with an overview of major learnings from the programme to-date. These relate primarily to reducing the cost of participation in NEII by data custodians given the challenge of delivering data using NEII standards; and developing approaches to better support users to use the portfolio of NEII data given some of the methods of data delivery may be new to non-technical users. The NEII programme has prioritised both these and developed work packages to achieve improvements.
