This is a step forward, however, it is incomplete as this is an example of a request for transparency data but not open data. This approach would not include access to the nations databases:
- Inventory of resources,
- air quality
- water quality
- brown fields
- clear cuts
- corporate pollutant releases
- mine tailing sites
- nuclear waste disposal sites & mining sites
- contaminated sites
- aggregated health care data e.g. incidences of respiratory illness, cancer, etc.
- social determinants of healh data
- demographic data
- factory locations
- satelite imagery
- map data
- and so on
This position would mean access to contracts, procurement, disclosure, spending, etc. but not to the databases themselves. What we want are access to the data generated to manage government programs, the data of inventories of resources, thematic data associated with issues such as health and so on. We would want access to the aggregated data from the following agencies:
- Agriculture Canada
- Natural Resources Canada
- Environment Canada
- Industry Canada
- PWGSC
- Health Canada
- HRSDC
- etc.
That would be about open data. Requesting the creation of a linked infrastructure or a discovery portal that would pool all of these resources in a centralized location, these would be standardized, georeferenced, with good metadata and unrestrictive use licenses. Data would be aggregated at standard geographies such as dissemination areas, cities, health districts, and so on. The Open Data cities have started to do this, but what we really need is a program that spans government departments at federal, provincial & territorial as well as municipal scales that would be as robust as that created by the GeoConnections program. On top of that we need preservations strategies and a records management approach to data. We need a new infrastructure to do this, which needs money, will and an agency to take ownership of it. An agency that can span these jurisdictions but knows how to collaborate with all these cross-disciplinary/sectoral entities. Anything less is not open data.
That would be a real open data strategy, one based on open government principals, where transparency and access to public data sets are part of that larger idea.
Cheers
t
--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
Locked
