A council's open data catalogue is mostly not live data

Four integrations bring council open data into Home Assistant. Building them was mostly a lesson in what an open data portal contains.

Most of a catalogue is static. Brisbane lists 448 datasets. The great majority are locations of things and historical extracts. Filtering down to data that changes took the first version of each integration from every dataset to a short list: Moreton Bay went from 83 sensors to 31, Logan from 47 to 40, Ipswich from 68 to 22. Ipswich has essentially no live feeds at all, only locations, and its bin collection days are not open data. They are available only through the council’s app.

Four councils, three platforms. Brisbane runs Opendatasoft, now called Huwise. Moreton Bay and Logan run ArcGIS Hub. Ipswich publishes through the national CKAN catalogue at data.gov.au. Each has a different way to list datasets and count records, so each integration has its own client behind the same sensor shape.

An address is not a key. Bin days are published per property, keyed by an address string in whatever form the council stores it. Matching what someone types means trying an exact match first and then a looser one, so that unit numbers, postcodes and commas do not defeat it. Offering suburb, then street, then house number as dropdowns filled from the dataset itself works better than free text.

Recycling weeks come two ways. Brisbane publishes the list of week-start dates for each zone. Moreton Bay and Logan publish only “week 1” or “week 2”, which has to be turned into dates by counting fortnights from a known Monday. Neither accounts for public holidays, which the councils announce separately.