pollutionwatch

[Michael Lenczner]

did someone already send a link about this?

http://www.pollutionwatch.org/about/about.jsp

"PollutionWatch is your source for information about pollutants that
facilities release and transfer in your community"

"This web site uses data from the federal government's National
Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) because it is the only publicly
available, annual source of information on a wide range of pollutants
released and transferred from individual facilities across Canada. The
site uses 2003 NPRI data (as reported in April 2005) as it is the most
recent publicly available data. Time trends on PollutionWatch use NPRI
data from 1995-2003."

put in your postal code, get info about companies polluting in your area.

it's kinda like http://www.scorecard.org

[Stephane Guidoin]

> did someone already send a link about this?
> http://www.pollutionwatch.org/about/about.jsp


That's really nice. Once I was looking for something equivalent but
never found that site. Very helpful ! Unfortunately this is not enough
referenced and less ergonomic than ScoreCard.

Coincidence : yesterday I was digging the NPRI database (the data source
for this site) and was trying to figure out what was the copyright
policy for this publicly available database. Obviously it's covered by
the copyright act/crown copyright which only allows non-commercial use.

There were some discussions here about non-commercial vs. commercial use
for the data. In this example (pollutionwatch), if may guess is correct,
the website couldn't add some Google Adsense to pay there hosting (or
anything else), even if it's a NGO. Unfortunately, the website detailing
the crown copyright is... under revision
(http://publications.gc.ca/helpAndInfo/cc-dac/crownis-e.html)

We'll wait to see what happens with the Stat Can announcement but those
data will probably be released under the same as the NPRI database
restrictions : public with crown copyright.

Stef