Capability 2.2.1

Language, Arts, Culture & History

Definition

Datasets capturing linguistic, creative, cultural, multicultural, ethnic and historical expression, including large-scale text and speech corpora, First Nations and other low resource language materials, audiovisual and heritage archives, social media, and media subtitling or transcription data.

Examples

Trove (National Library of Australia)
AUSTLANG (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) – National Indigenous language catalogue and metadata repository. National Archives of Australia
LDaCa Language Data Commons of Australia.

Indicators

Coverage, inclusion and digitisation of cultural and language corpora
Standardised metadata schema
Federated compliance and scalability (legal and institutional interoperability)
FAIR compliance (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable)
CARE compliance (collective benefit, authority to control, responsiblilty and ethics)
Provenance and lineage tracking
Consent frameworks
Onshore hosting and secure processing environments (e.g. SURE)
Clear licensing
Longevity and version control
Domain specific data standards
Machine readiness formatting

National AI Plan

PLAN COMMITMENT

Limited commitment

General: Recognises the value of Australian datasets, their importance to developing and training AI models that are locally relevant, and commits to exploring opportunities and pilot use cases to unlock high value datasets, including to build on existing programs of work to improve Australian Public Sector (APS) data and data maturity, consistent data standards and metadata, build trusted and secure approaches to data sharing, and identify high value, non-sensitive datasets (Action 2).Given the commitment is to 'explore opportunities' with no specific detail on implementation or funding, this is assessed to be limited. This capability: No specific commitments relating to Language, Arts, Culture & History (beyond that referred to in 2.1). Limited commitment by government in the plan represents a missed opportunity. More should be done to build agency and leverage to offset capability gaps elsewhere in the ecosystem.

Stocktake

Aboriginal English Voices._ The University of Western Australia_ (Language Lab / UWA Profiles & Research Repository). Accessed October 2025. https://www.uwa.edu.au/schools/research/the-language-lab
ACMI Film & Moving Image Collection. Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Accessed October 2025. https://www.acmi.net.au/works
Austlang for First Nations languages (MURA catalogue & AIATSIS thesauri). Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Accessed October 2025. https://aiatsis.gov.au/austlang
Language Data Commons of Australia LDaCA. Accessed October 2025. https://www.ldaca.edu.au/

Is the Stocktake missing evidence?

Share additional information for potential future Assessments