Content and Growth of Municipal Open Data Catalogues

Interesting posting related to Open Data in Canada.


http://www.gogeomatics.ca/magazine/content-and-growth-of-municipal-open-data-catalogues.htm?utm_source=GoGeomatics+Canada+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f7ba60d2d9-Canadian_Spatial_Times_13_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4512ec0c46-f7ba60d2d9-53818093#

What’s the Deal with 3DEP?

The USGS is starting an interesting program related to 3D data...


http://gisandscience.com/2014/07/18/whats-the-deal-with-3dep/

Why you should care about open data and how it benefits your community

By Paula Arab, Content Contributor

Welcome to the new world of Open Data portals, data-thons and speed data’ing.

The latter two – data-thons and speed data’ing – have put the romance into Open Data portals by challenging techies to create user-friendly applications from huge data files of municipal information.

Called Open Data websites or portals, major municipalities and governments across North America are literally opening their databases to the public and finding creative ways to make such large quantities of data practical and relevant to the general public.

“It’s giving people access to what they have already paid for: tax-payer funded municipal data,” says  Jessica Letizia, who is busy preparing for the launch this fall of the Calgary Regional Partnership’s Open Data portal, which the Partnership will operate and fund on behalf of member municipalities.

Letizia, a data specialist, acknowledges that information alone and out-of-context, is of little value to most people. But it’s a gold mine for those experts who know how to turn the data into useful tools for the public.

Creative and useful applications

While approaches vary, the most successful examples of Open Data portals engage citizens through data’ing contests.

Hackers, developers, statisticians and members of the general public are invited to create accessible applications (or Apps) from the information, bringing together data and technology in ways that improve life for citizens.

For example, one App developer in New York took a municipal data set on restaurant inspections and created the DontEat.at app, “the digital equivalent of seeing a rat or cockroach scurry across the kitchen of a restaurant,” from a Mashable article called “Your City Needs These 7 Open Data Apps.”

Another App noted in the article, tracks cycling routes of users, along with every pothole cyclists stumble upon and other problems such as debris on the road. 

Such information helps both cyclists and city administrators. The former can avoid the problem routes while the latter can use the App to make more cost-effective and strategic decisions on things like what potholes to fix first, in alignment with the city’s cycling strategy.

Closer to home, the City of Edmonton was the first in Canada to hold an Open Data competition in 2010.

The “Open data hack-a-thon” led to the creation of more than 30 citizen-created Apps based on Edmonton’s open data sets.

The most popular App tracked construction and road closures and gave Edmonton’s Open Data portal “instant credibility,” said Chris More, the City’s Chief Information Officer.

“It’s not enough, though, to just release the data,” Moore has said about Open Data portals. “After all, it’s not like people are clamouring for more data to be released. It takes citizen engagement to help make the project successful.”

Open Data in the Calgary Region

Open Data catalogues allow municipalities to be more transparent by giving them a place to upload large files of public data – everything typically from whose buried in what cemetery to the location of outdoor water fountains, fire stations or every publicly planted tree.

While many larger municipalities in Alberta already have their own Open Data portals, the Calgary Regional Partnership has identified a need to launch and operate an Open Data portal for members that don’t.

“This is something we’re going to do for our members,” said Letizia, who is aiming for a September start-up.

So far, five member municipalities have committed to using the Calgary Regional Partnership portal including Airdrie, Okotoks and Strathmore. Others, like Calgary and Banff, already operate their own sites.

“The new model will save municipalities much in time and money,” says Letizia, a Regional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Coordinator who used to work for the City of Airdrie.

She says the currently way of accessing data files was timely and tedious. It involved a lot of red tape and potentially days of work that would result in a small token charge between $25-$50.

“Getting a data request was awful,” says Letizia, who is leading the Open Data project for the Partnership. “It was a massive amount of work for little return,” she said.

“If you can make all of this data available on a site, people could go there to get the information without ever having to contact the municipality. It’s just a lot more efficient and easier for everyone.”

Paula Arab of Paula Arab & Associates Inc. is a national media, communications and writing consultant.

Have any ideas on making municipal and regional data useful? We would love to hear from you!