Melbourne’s WingArc Australia has been helping government departments, statistical agencies, and private organisations all over the world to explore and publish data easily and safely for nearly 35 years. The WingArc data platform, SuperWEB2, is designed to give end users very flexible, self-service access to large datasets, while protecting the confidentiality of the individuals in that data.

WingArc has been working with the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Statistics New Zealand for over 30 years, and SuperWEB2 is the technology behind the Australian Bureau of Statistics TableBuilder platform. With this tool, anyone can explore the Australian Census data, running ad-hoc queries to answer any question, rather than relying on predefined tables. Given the sensitivity of the census data, confidentiality was a key consideration for the ABS. WingArc’s confidentiality solution, perturbation, applies statistical disclosure control to the datasets that protects the identity of the individuals in the data without disrupting the overall trends.

Elsewhere in Australia, agencies like Tourism Research Australia use SuperWEB2 to share their survey data on domestic travel and inbound international visitors. WingArc software helps TRA to deliver large and complex datasets to their stakeholders in the Australian tourism industry, offering efficient, self-service access through the SuperWEB2 portal.

Further afield, the tool is used all over the world. In South Africa, where Internet infrastructure is still lacking in some of the provinces, the national statistics agency distributes WingArc’s desktop data analytics solution on CD-ROMs to open up access to the country’s national census to citizens across the country.

Agencies across Europe deliver vital public open data using WingArc’s platform, and in the UK the Department for Work and Pensions (which has a similar role to Centrelink, and is responsible for welfare payments, child maintenance and the state pension), uses SuperWEB2 to publish many millions of records across over 70 datasets that cover its various payments and cases. That system, rebranded by the department as Stat-Xplore, is used extensively by other UK government agencies, researchers, and the general public. It is widely regarded as a strong success story for Open Data in the UK.

To learn more about WingArc’s solution and its applications, see WingArc’s website for more open data case studies.