Last updated 17 October 2026
Compliance and Governance
Who We Are
DataQuoll, formerly EmergencyAPI, is operated by SEY Solutions (ABN 13 531 353 123), a registered Australian business.
We aggregate real-time emergency incident and warning data from official Australian government feeds, plus a few clearly-flagged community-decoded sources and national data (Geoscience Australia, satellite hotspot data), into a single standardised API.
We Operate as a Warnings Republisher
Under the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR) framework, DataQuoll is classified as a "Privately owned warning publisher or disseminator". The same category includes global digital platforms (Google, Facebook), insurers providing customer alerts, and private weather services.
This designation was confirmed in a formal reply from the Bureau of Meteorology (CAP-AU Custodian), on 16 April 2026. AIDR publishes a guidance document for operators in our category, the Warnings Republishers Companion (AIDR 2021, CC BY 4.0), which lists twelve operational obligations.
This page documents our posture against each of those obligations, plus adjacent concerns (CAP-AU standards alignment, agency engagement, data licensing, security, privacy) that matter to customers evaluating us.
The 12 AIDR Obligations: Our Status
Our self-audit against the twelve obligations in the AIDR Warnings Republishers Companion, reviewed as of 29 April 2026:
| # | Obligation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Establish prior relationship with statutory provider (MoU or informal) | Partial |
| 2 | Platform robust under high demand | Satisfied |
| 3 | Warnings are current and republished in a timely manner | Satisfied |
| 4 | Preserve intent of warning (wording and spatial representation) | Partial |
| 5 | Include original source, date, and time of publication | Satisfied |
| 6 | Republish revisions, updates, and de-escalations | Satisfied |
| 7 | Indicate unofficial sources clearly | Satisfied |
| 8 | Verify unofficial information against official sources | Satisfied |
| 9 | Remove, retract, or correct inaccurate content promptly | Satisfied |
| 10 | CAP-AU-STD compliance consideration | Satisfied |
| 11 | Comply with relevant legislation, regulations, privacy and data laws | Satisfied |
| 12 | Understand legal responsibilities and liability as a republisher | Satisfied |
Summary: 10 fully satisfied, 2 partial. Retraction schema, upstream cancellation detection, and unofficial-source verification policy shipped in v1.9.0. Remaining partial items: prior relationships (ongoing outreach) and warning intent preservation (certainty-field audit).
CAP-AU and OASIS Standards
DataQuoll produces CAP output that validates against OASIS Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) v1.2, the international XML standard for public warning messages, and its Australian profile (CAP-AU-STD v3.0, maintained by the Bureau of Meteorology).
- Response schema maps cleanly to CAP-AU concepts (severity, urgency, certainty, eventType, geometry).
- A standards-validated CAP Atom feed is available via
?format=cap-atom, plus per-incident CAP documents via/incidents/[id]?format=cap-au. Both validate against the OASIS CAP 1.2 schema and the CAP-AU Profile v3.0 (confirmed with the Google CAP Validator). The older?format=cap-aulist output is a non-standard wrapper, kept for backward compatibility but deprecated. - Native CAP-AU ingestion from WA DFES and ACT ESA without lossy transformation.
- Schema designed to the underlying OASIS v1.2 baseline per Bureau of Meteorology guidance. OASIS is the permanent international standard underneath the Australian profile.
- We monitor the 12-month CAP-AU review cycle announced by BOM in April 2026.
Agency Engagement
We maintain a transparent paper trail of our engagement with every agency whose data we consume. Customers can verify our standing directly with the relevant agency using the contacts below.
| Agency / Body | Jurisdiction | Status | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| WA DFES | Western Australia | Open licence | Data published under CC BY-ND 4.0 by the Government of Western Australia (DFES), which confirmed commercial use is permitted with conditions: ingest only from a designated feed (SLIP, RSS, or CAP-AU) and do not alter the content. Our CAP-AU warnings feed is on a designated source. The incidents feed is currently on the non-designated public API while a SLIP token issue is resolved; restoring the designated SLIP source is an open item. See emergency.wa.gov.au/about for licence details. |
| BOM CAP-AU Custodian | Commonwealth | Engaged | Formal correspondence with Bureau of Meteorology. Governance-level engagement on CAP-AU alignment and republisher status, ongoing since April 2026. |
| NT PFES | Northern Territory | Progressing | NT Fire and Emergency Services has no official data endpoint yet and is building GeoJSON and CAP-AU endpoints over the next year. We read its public incident map file, which states no licence and which NTFES has not asked us to stop using, and will move to the official endpoints when they launch. |
| QLD QFD | Queensland | Open licence | Queensland Fire Department data published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Commercial use explicitly permitted. Attribution satisfied via our /api/v1/attribution endpoint. |
| ACT ESA | Australian Capital Territory | Open licence | ACT Emergency Services Agency data published under CC BY 4.0. Commercial use explicitly permitted. |
| Main Roads Western Australia | WA | Open licence | WebEOC road closures published under CC BY 3.0 Australia via data.gov.au. Open for commercial use. |
| Transport for NSW | New South Wales | Open licence | Live Traffic hazard data published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The Transport Open Data Hub terms permit redistribution and reuse on the condition that Transport for NSW is attributed as the source, which our attribution endpoint carries on every one of the six feeds. Commercial use permitted. Transport for NSW is a separate agency from the NSW Rural Fire Service and its open licence is independent of that request. |
| Victorian Department of Transport and Planning | Victoria | Open licence | Unplanned road disruption data published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, recorded on the Transport Victoria Open Data Portal's own dataset record. Commercial use permitted, attribution carried on every record. This is a separate publisher from Emergency Management Victoria, whose emergency feeds carry their own CC BY 3.0 Australia notice. |
| Geoscience Australia | Commonwealth | Open licence | GA earthquake data, the national Emergency Management Facilities layer and the near-real-time bushfire extents (Digital Atlas) are published under CC BY 4.0, confirmed from the services' own metadata, and explicitly open for commercial use. The G-NAF derived address columns on the facilities layer carry a separate licence and are deliberately not collected. Safety caveat: the bushfire extents are not to be used for safety of life decisions (per GA). |
| Australian Competition and Consumer Commission | Commonwealth | Open licence | The mobile site records in the ACCC Mobile Infrastructure Report data release are published on data.gov.au under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia, which permits commercial use. The attribution is published at /api/v1/attribution and on the dataset page, and every record names the ACCC as its source. The layer is a location reference: it is never presented as coverage or proof of service. |
| NSW RFS | New South Wales | Open licence | NSW Rural Fire Service publishes its website material under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. We attribute it in the form RFS asks for: © State of New South Wales (NSW Rural Fire Service). For current information go to www.rfs.nsw.gov.au. |
| VIC EMV | Victoria | Open licence | Emergency Management Victoria publishes its data-feed licence on the EMV Emergency data notice: State of Victoria copyright, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia, with three attribution conditions (name the State of Victoria, link the notice, and display the last update time when publishing warning data). Verified 22 August 2026. Our attribution endpoint carries the required text and link, and /api/v1/status publishes each feed's last poll time. The separate VIC CFA fire-danger feed is CC BY 4.0. |
| SA CFS, MFS and SES | South Australia | Open licence | CFS and SES incidents are used under CC BY 4.0. MFS incidents come from SAFECOM's data.eso.sa.gov.au, published under Creative Commons Australia Attribution 3.0. Each is attributed in the Government of South Australia's form: the title of the work, the date it was sourced and its URL, served at /api/v1/attribution. |
| South Australia Police | South Australia | Open licence | SAPOL media releases are used under CC BY 4.0. We collect each release as published, keep every edit as a version, and carry the required attribution on every response. Release images, which can show identifiable people, are withheld while we take legal advice; only the text is served. |
| Geoscape Australia (G-NAF) | National | Open licence | G-NAF, the national address file, is published on data.gov.au under the Open G-NAF End User Licence Agreement: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 with one added restriction, that it is not used to compile addresses for sending mail unless each is checked against a second source. We use it to place SA Police releases from their own text and to match an address a caller sends, one address per call and never a list, never to compile addresses, and carry the required attribution, with a note of what we changed, at the attribution endpoint. |
| TAS TFS / TasALERT | Tasmania | Open licence | Tasmania Fire Service publishes its data feeds under CC BY 4.0 and expressly permits third-party republication (TFS feeds terms, fire.tas.gov.au). We attribute TFS, show each record's update time, and carry the TFS disclaimer that data is extracted from its incident-management system and may not be real-time. This supersedes our earlier CC BY-SA 3.0 AU reading; ShareAlike does not apply. |
| AIDR (AFAC) | National | Pending reply | Outreach sent 21 April 2026 declaring DataQuoll as a warnings republisher, requesting AWS hazard-icon usage guidance, and requesting Community of Practice inclusion. Awaiting response. Note: AIDR Knowledge Hub database content is Crown copyright (custom licence), not CC BY. AIDR publications are CC BY 4.0. |
| DEA Hotspots (GA) | Commonwealth | Open licence | Digital Earth Australia Hotspots satellite fire detection data published by Geoscience Australia under CC BY 4.0. Commercial use explicitly permitted. Safety caveat: DEA Hotspots is not to be used for safety of life decisions (per GA documentation). |
| NEMA | Commonwealth | Progressing | Email sent 14 April 2026 referencing Royal Commission Recommendations 13.1 and 13.2 (unified national alerting). NEMA acknowledged 24 April, forwarded to relevant internal team during high-tempo operational period. |
| State water agencies (gauges) | NSW, VIC, QLD, SA | Open licence | River gauge observations from WaterNSW, the Victorian Water Measurement Information System, the Queensland water monitoring portal, and Water Data SA, all published under CC BY 4.0 (Queensland returns the licence in-band with every API response). Attribution displayed at the attribution endpoint. |
| Brisbane City Council (operator telemetry) | QLD | Open licence | Rainfall and stream height telemetry from Brisbane City Council's own flood sensors (data.brisbane.qld.gov.au), published under CC BY 4.0. 46 stream gauges including the Brisbane River Port Office gauge. The flood-warning gauges are operated by councils and water corporations rather than the state water portals, so this is the operator channel. Attribution displayed at the attribution endpoint. |
| Water Data Tasmania / NT Water Data Portal | TAS, NT | Open licence | Gauge observations published under CC BY 4.0: Water Data Tasmania under the Tasmanian Government Open Data Policy, and the NT Water Data Portal under its own CC BY 4.0 notice. Attribution displayed at the attribution endpoint. |
| BoM Water Data Online + flood classifications | National | Open licence | Water Data Online is CC BY 3.0 AU. Flood classification levels are reproduced from published BoM reference tables and Service Level Specification documents with attribution (Commonwealth copyright); these are public web artefacts, not the non-commercial FTP warning products, which we do not consume. |
| BoM National Flood-Warning river heights (IDZ65911) | National | Open licence | Real-time river heights from the Bureau's National Flood-Warning network, a public web product reproduced with the Commonwealth copyright attribution the Bureau specifies. Not the FTP warning products. Attribution text at /api/v1/attribution. |
Status legend
- Approved. Written or verbal approval received.
- Engaged. Formal governance-level engagement.
- Progressing. Internal agency enquiries underway.
- Open licence. Data published under a licence that explicitly permits our use.
- Pending reply. Written request sent, awaiting reply.
Data Sources and Licensing
Full per-source attribution, including the licence under which each feed is provided and whether the source is an official statutory agency or a community-decoded feed, is available at our attribution endpoint:
dataquoll.io/api/v1/attribution
Every source carries an official: boolean flag. Statutory government feeds return true. A small number of community-decoded sources (SA pager dispatches via urgmsg.net, which decode public GRN radio transmissions under the Australian Radiocommunications Act) return false. Customers who need statutory-only data can filter on that flag.
Historical Archive Sources
The historical archive behind /incidents/history, /incidents/snapshot and hazard history is built from these published datasets. Each is attributed at the endpoint above with the statement its licence requires.
| Dataset | Publisher | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Bushfire Historical Extents - Version 3.0 | Geoscience Australia | CC BY 4.0 |
| National Bushfire Extents - Accumulation | Geoscience Australia | CC BY 4.0 |
| National Bushfire Extents (Northern Territory) | Geoscience Australia | CC BY 4.0 |
| National Bushfire Extents - Near Real-Time | Geoscience Australia | CC BY 4.0 |
| Geoscience Australia Earthquake Catalogue | Geoscience Australia | CC BY 4.0 |
| 2019-20 Financial Year Bushfire Boundaries | National Recovery and Resilience Agency | CC BY 4.0 |
| NSW and Southern QLD Flood DRFA Activated LGAs March 2021 | National Recovery and Resilience Agency | CC BY 4.0 |
| DRFA Activation History by LGA | National Emergency Management Agency | CC BY 2.5 AU |
| Disaster Events with Category Impact and Location | Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (Attorney-General's Department) | CC BY 4.0 |
| Tropical Cyclone Best Track database | Bureau of Meteorology | CC BY 4.0 |
| International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS), Version 4 | NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information | Public domain (NOAA) |
| QFD Incident Data | Queensland Fire Department | CC BY 4.0 |
| Flood extent series | Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Manufacturing and Regional and Rural Development | CC BY 4.0 |
| Flood Awareness - Historic - Brisbane River and Creek Floods - Feb 2022 | Brisbane City Council | CC BY 4.0 |
| NPWS Fire History - Wildfires and Prescribed Burns | NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water | CC BY 4.0 |
| ESA Incidents and Responses (2004 to 2016) | ACT Emergency Services Agency | CC BY 4.0 |
| Fire History Records of Fires across Victoria | Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (Victoria) | CC BY 4.0 |
| CFA Incident Responses | Country Fire Authority | CC BY 4.0 |
| Victorian Flood History October 2022 Event Public | Emergency Management Victoria | CC BY 4.0 |
| Fire Service Incidents | South Australian Metropolitan Fire Service | CC BY 4.0 |
| CFS Brigade Incidents | SA Country Fire Service | CC BY 4.0 |
| Last Bushfire and Prescribed Burn Boundaries | Department for Environment and Water (South Australia) | CC BY 4.0 |
| Bushfires and Prescribed Burns History | Department for Environment and Water (South Australia) | CC BY 4.0 |
| River Murray Flood 2022 | Department for Environment and Water (South Australia) | CC BY 4.0 |
| Road Crash Data | Department for Infrastructure and Transport (South Australia) | CC BY 4.0 |
| DBCA Fire History (DBCA-060) | Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions (Western Australia) | CC BY 4.0 |
| FPM Historical Extent of Flooding (DWER-123) | Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (Western Australia) | CC BY 4.0 |
| FPM Historical Floodplain Area (DWER-124) | Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (Western Australia) | CC BY 4.0 |
| Fire History | the LIST, © State of Tasmania | CC BY 4.0 |
Security Posture
- External security audit: A grade (90/100). SSL/TLS 100, Security Headers 85, Supply Chain 95, Best Practices 100.
- Authentication: API keys (SHA-256 hashed at rest). IP-based rate limiting on auth routes.
- Transport: HTTPS enforced via Vercel. HSTS, CSP, and X-Frame-Options headers applied.
- Infrastructure: Self-healing container pipeline on dedicated hardware. Supabase Pro database with daily automated backups and 7-day retention.
Privacy
We comply with the Australian Privacy Act 1988. Our full Privacy Policy is at /privacy, including how we collect, store, and protect account information and API usage data.
Legal Posture and Liability
Our Terms of Service at /terms include warnings-republisher-specific clauses aligned with the AIDR framework, including:
- Explicit disclaimer that DataQuoll is not a substitute for official emergency warnings.
- Commitment to best-effort propagation of upstream revisions, updates, and de-escalations (ToS §5).
- Explicit disclosure that community-decoded pager feeds are not statutory sources (ToS §13).
- Limitation of liability under Australian law (ToS §6).
Review and Update Cadence
This page is reviewed quarterly. The next scheduled review is 5 January 2027. Re-audit is also triggered by:
- Any new AIDR Companion version.
- CAP-AU standard revision (the current 12-month review cycle is in progress).
- Material changes to our feed sources or ingest posture, including any import into the historical archive.
- Any regulatory inquiry or incident.
Contact for Compliance Inquiries
For procurement, compliance verification, or partnership conversations:
