Legal Research

Data Dot Gc

By Simon Fodden

Yesterday the OpenParliament site for Canadians, today an open data site for us. Like its parliamentary cousin, though, DataDotGc.ca is not, alas, a government initiative; rather, it’s the work of a group of private citizens led by David Eaves, a B.C. activist and public policy wonk. As they say on the site:

Unlike the United States (data.gov) and Britain (data.gov.uk), Canada has no open data strategy. This must change. Canadians paid for the information gathered about our country, ourselves and our government. Free access to it could help stimulate our economy and enhance our democracy. In pursuit of this goal, this website is a citizen-led effort to promote open data and help share data that has already been liberated.

What’s on the site? Well, thanks to the tight-fisted government, not nearly as much as there should be. The chart on the main page says it all:

But if it’s freely available, they’ve got pointers to it. The page on “all packages” of data reveals 678 records, such things as “Gold & Silver Mines Energy Use & GHG Emissions” or “Canada Land Inventory (1:50 000) – Land Use (circa 1966)” and “Personal Use Vehicles in Canada: Fuel Consumption Profile.” The links lead to government web pages, where data is made available in various formats. Potential users still must extract the data sets themselves in order to make use of them.

This is clearly a shaming site as well as a demonstration site. As part of a larger open data movement, the site builders are clear about what properly constitutes open data and what they — and government — can do to benefit Canadians:

Open data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data are freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. For government data to be open it must, at a minimum comply with three laws of open data. In short:

• If it can?t be spidered or indexed, it doesn?t exist (something this website seeks to help accomplish)
• If it isn?t available in open and machine readable format, it can?t engage (something we hope to help enhance in version 2.0 of this site)
• If a legal framework doesn?t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn?t empower (sadly there is nothing we can do on this front wherever licenses present an obstacle)

Note, law folks, that one of those balls is in our court.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on April 15, 2010 (boomark / email).