Ottawa to Consider Open Data Portal

During 2010, the city of Ottawa made significant strides in launching an open data portal. Open data is a concept wherein information about the public collected by the government should be easily accessible to the public, as long as that information does not compromise privacy, or is otherwise proprietary. In many other countries, including the United States, open data is provided to the citizens through online portals which allow them to quickly download and manipulate the data. Useful open data is generally presented in a format that allows users to find exactly what they need without having to spend a great deal of time wading through reports. As an example, applications have been developed to display a listing of a city’s museums and their operating hours.

Several other Canadian cities, including Vancouver and Toronto, have also been working on launching official open data portals. Canada as a whole lacks an open data portal. Part of the difficulty for Canada specifically is that public information is currently available, but for a fee. A listing of national postal codes, for example, is available for a fee of several thousand dollars. Enormous citizen interest has begun to prompt cities, and even the national government, to experiment with launching free open data portals.

A motion was introduced in Ottawa’s city council in October of 2008 to officially review the open data policy, leading to a debate that lasted for several years. On May 12, 2010, Ottawa’s city council voted to adopt an open data policy, prompting the city to tentatively launch an open data portal (www.ottawa.ca/online_services/opendata/info/index_en.html). As of June 2010, the public information available on the site is not comprehensive, featuring information mainly about parks and recreational facilities, such as tennis courts. The data is difficult to manipulate, and the official open data portal is only an adjunct of the city’s larger home page.

However, significant progress has been made. A citizen group known as the Open Data Ottawa Hackfest held a conference in April of 2010 which invited open source developers and designers to submit applications that could quickly sort through and effectively display municipal data. Although the conference had no official ties to Ottawa’s open data portal, a few weeks later the city began to debate the concept of holding an officially sponsored contest where it would invite developers and designers to submit open data applications for use on smartphones. In May, the city approved a measure to hold a contest in the fall of 2010, with cash prizes totaling $50,000.

If the success rate of other open data portals in other cities is any indication, Ottawa may soon have a fully accessible open data portal developed in part by its citizenry.