2026 finalists

The winners will be announced on 18 March 2026 at the 2026 APS Data Awards Gala Night.  

Data Leadership and Capability Building 

Trove Metadata Manager Project – National Library of Australia

Data Capability Innovation in Antarctica – Australian Antarctic Data Centre

National Climate Risk Assessment Climate and Hazards Data – Australian Climate Service

 

Data Sharing and Partnerships 

Combatting fraud through private and public sector data sharing with Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) – Australian Taxation Office 

The First Five Years project ─ Unlocking powerful insights into what drives child development through integrated data – Department of Education 

Understanding climate risk to communities – Australian Climate Service

 

Data Science and Analytics

Data Team – Heartbeat Neural Network for Fraud Detection – IP Australia 

Analysis and Insights team – Tourism Research Australia, Austrade

Illuminating Australia’s invisible industries with the Emerging Industries Database – Department of Industry, Science and Resources

 

Data Visualisation and Storytelling

From satellite to story: Visualising Australia's changing landscapes in the Digital Atlas – Geoscience Australia 

Communicating cascading and compounding risk in Australia's first National Climate Risk Assessment – Australian Climate Service

Space Debris Monitoring & Mapping – Australian Space Agency

 

Data Systems and Innovation

Building the Person Linkage Spine with Splink – Australian Bureau of Statistics

ABS Data Coding Capability – Australian Bureau of Statistics

AI Tiger Team – Data & Insights – Department of Veterans’ Affairs

 

Early Data Career

Risk Integration Team – Australian Climate Service

Three steps to ethically identify Indigenous data in the APS – Department of Education

Alexander Pritchard – Department of Social Services

 

Diversity and Inclusion in Data

Sentinels of Sea Country: First Nation-Led use of Drones and AI in managing Ghost Nets and Marine Debris – Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water

Unaccompanied and overlooked – unlocking data to inform child-specific homelessness services – Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

Building trust through inclusive processes for disability data – Australian Institute of Health and Welfare