It’s Vancouver’s Turn
May 15th, 2009
In the wake of Toronto’s announcement that it’s opening up its data comes a similar advance in Vancouver. Those of you looking for research and business opportunities as well as a chance to make the places you live more livable, dive in!
And if you’re going to be a graduate or senior undergraduate student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto this fall, and would like to get course credit for doing something wonderful with all this data, please give me a shout.
The most useful data for statistical analysis (the Census data) still seems unlikely to be released to the general public (though academics can still get it via University subscriptions), from the Social Policy Analysis and Research group:
“regardless of what the mayor may say the City cannot release raw Statistics Canada datasets under our contractual agreements, so it’s unlikely we’ll be releasing complete CT or DA level info in a GIS format any time soon unless a new legal framework is developed (and paid for). Unlike in the US, procuring this data is very expensive and it mostly cannot be shared.”