:
Good morning and thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It is a great honour to be here before the committee to speak about our success and our work on open data for the government.
[English]
I'm very pleased to be here with my two colleagues to talk about open data. I'll introduce Stephen Walker, who is the senior director for our information management policy sector as well as for open government at TB Secretariat. With him is Sylvain Latour, who is a director of our Open Government Secretariat at TBS.
The way we propose to cover the material this morning is that we have a presentation in two parts, and we propose to have a demo. We will go through the first part of our presentation.
[Translation]
You have in front of you a presentation which, I think, gives a good summary of the key concepts concerning open data.
[English]
We'll start off with essentially a primer on open data, what the key concepts are, and then we will stop and do a demonstration. You've noticed the screens in the room. We'll have a live demonstration. Stephen and Sylvain will go through our actual open data portal and show you some examples of the data and how the portal works. Then we'll revert to the presentation to give a summary of what different initiatives are going on within the federal government and with our colleagues across Canada in other jurisdictions, and in fact, on our initiatives internationally on the open data front. Of course, we'd be delighted to answer whatever questions the committee has.
That's what we propose by way of the three-section approach. Before I start into the first part of the presentation, I would like to say that we've just completed a very exciting weekend. On February 28, launched the Canadian Open Data Experience, which is an appathon challenge that brought together, finally, 927 registered participants from across Canada, from universities in all provinces across Canada, to try to see what kinds of applications they could develop using Canada's open data information published on our portal.
It was a very exciting weekend, and at the end of it, preliminary reports suggested that over 100 different apps were developed and will be validated and vetted and be the subject of tough competition. The finale of CODE will be March 28, in Toronto, where the 15 finalists will review their apps with the judges. The finalists will be awarded a prize.
This is very exciting because this would be our first national CODE appathon. Different provinces and cities have had a few, and there have been a number of efforts across Canada, but this is the first on a pan-Canadian basis. The success of CODE is a testimony to the enthusiasm and interest in Canada's open data portal and the information that we make available to Canadians.
With that, I will go into the presentation and hopefully help to demystify this. We'll be doing section 1.
Page 3 is titled “Open Data Fundamentals”. I apologize that some of you may be well aware of this, but we weren't sure so we thought we'd bring everyone to a certain level of knowledge.
So what is raw data?
Raw data is machine-readable data at the lowest level of integration that can be reused alone, or mashed up—as the term is—with other data in innovative ways.The government either generates or collects and aggregates a vast amount of raw data. The best example of raw data would be weather data that we collect through sensors and radar and a variety of other means. We turn that into raw data, numerical data that is available for further processing and manipulation.
So what is metadata? Metadata is data about data. Metadata is key to the potential of open data. Without metadata, the vast numbers of data sets and information that are available are not as useful.
It's very important to describe the contents of a data set and to describe the specific kinds of information in each field of a data set that is presented, so that when application developers go to the data set, they know they're finding the right data set with the right kind of data and they know how to interpret the different fields. That's an important part of using the data effectively. In Canada, making our data available in an open data portal first involves producing metadata in both official languages so that app developers can quickly understand what the nature of the data set is and can use it appropriately.
Finally, what is open data? Open data is the practice that takes the raw data and the metadata and makes it available through a portal, as is the case of data.gc.ca. It allows users to search through the portal for the right data sets and allows them to browse and then to download the data in machine-usable formats so they can develop programs and information systems that can manipulate it and produce other uses for it and greater advantages.
The open data movement is quite well developed today. In October 2013, McKinsey Global reported that the potential for open data to generate economic value is significant. This is McKinsey's view. Certainly, through open data efforts in the U.S., in the U.K., in Canada now, and all over the world, we've seen the rise of many, many businesses through the generation of apps that basically use open data and are now widely available through different online stores and so on. Certainly, all of the large consultancies, including Deloitte, speak to the fact that data is the new capital of the global economy, and the ability to harness the vast amounts of data that we do generate is really a large potential for Canada and for society as a whole.
Just to give you a recap of the history, in Canada we have long been aggregators and generators of data. In fact, the concept of open data started around 1995 with the important stores of geophysical and environmental data that we already collect and manipulate through NRCan and Environment Canada.
In California, of course, in the U.S. in 2007, open data started to become an important movement. In fact, in President Obama's first term, there was really the first important national foray, I guess, into open data, with his mandatory policy on the release of open data. The U.S. launch of that direction certainly stimulated open data movements in the U.K. and internationally. Certainly, we watched in Canada and also thought that this was a valuable movement to embrace. It's really a movement that has grown very quickly, and it is, certainly in Canada, stimulated quite a bit by the work by our cities—cities are very active in open data in Canada—as well as by the provinces and by us in the federal government.
Open data is certainly well established internationally. As you may know, the Open Government Partnership, first launched in 2011 by the U.S. and Brazil as co-chairs, was a strong platform for further developments in open data and making governments accountable, open, and responsive to citizens. Similarly, the World Bank has opened its data, knowledge, and research, and is a strong supporter of open data and of all our efforts.
The Open Knowledge Foundation is a civil society organization dedicated to promoting open data and open content. The OECD has also embraced open data and was present at the 2013 Open Government Partnership conference in the U.K.
Certainly the World Wide Web Foundation is, of course, a strong believer in open data.
Just to give you a capsule of open data in Canada, we're quite pleased with Canada's progress on this front. Four provinces—British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec—have open data portals, as do over 30 cities. In fact, certainly Vancouver was one of the first leaders in open data in Canada and continues to be very dedicated to that, but we're pleased with all of the municipal efforts, including the City of Ottawa, which is also working hard at open data.
Page 8 just contrasts what was it like, how civil society could access the data sets the government created and aggregated and made available, prior to open data. Before open data, the government was already publishing data, but in a different way and in a much smaller and less accessible way. Certainly weather data from Environment Canada has been available for some time, as were maps from Natural Resources Canada.
But what you see on the diagram on the right is one of the fundamental issues of the problem. Each individual department collected and prepared data and made it available on their own individual websites, but not always prominently, often without sufficient, or if you will, standard metadata that described the contents, and not always with appropriate search engines to access it.
So from a user's perspective, it wasn't easy to answer the question of what kind of data is available from the government on topic A or on topic B. The users would routinely have to go through multiple sites, go quite deep into the sites, and then the data was not necessarily in machine-readable format. So while they could visualize it, they couldn't really use it and create an information system.
Finally, an additional issue that users had to tackle at the time was that every individual website made the data available under slightly different licensing terms. The licensing terms are very critical to open data, and the ability to have an open licence that is recognized across Canada, that makes the data available for reuse without restriction on the same terms, is really key.
So that was the situation of data before open data.
Starting in 2009 we started to tackle these questions, and in fact started working on our first view of the licence and the first view of a portal that could potentially make this data available.
Why is open data important for the Government of Canada? Certainly we're strong believers that open data helps to reinforce accountability and the government's agenda. Certainly we are convinced that it does generate economic value for Canadians. It is aligned with our digital strategy, as we are working with our colleagues across government, and it is a key catalyst for innovation and science and technology. We are aligned with our international partners, and the success of CODE, I think, supports the fact that Canadians are equally aligned with it.
Just to highlight the key milestones from a government perspective on open data, in March 2011 the government announced our first open government initiative, and at the time, our first open data portal. That was our first pilot. We launched it with much fewer data sets and with the first version of the licence.
In April 2012 Canada joined the international Open Government Partnership formally. We published our first action plan on open government at that time. The action plan on open government includes, of course, a number of commitments on open data.
In June 2013 the Prime Minister formally adopted the Open Data Charter with other G-8 leaders at the Lough Erne Summit in Northern Ireland.
Just to recap on this part of the presentation, and before we go to the demo of the portal, I'll just say that we have continued to work hard on open data since our joining of the Open Government Partnership.
In fact, this June we launched the second generation open data platform. We now have about 200,000 data sets from 27 departments. We launched with six departments and their data sets. Our search capability is state-of-the-art and we have incorporated social media features onto the site, so we're very pleased with our new portal.
In terms of GC resource management data, the expenditure database was launched in April 2013 to provide Canadians with financial information on departmental spending over the last three years, and we continue to add data sets through all topic areas.
We are working hard right now on a directive on open government, so this will be policy that will help departments and agencies to create a better inventory of their data assets and the information to be published, and provide an implementation timeline for them to achieve this. That will be an important part of our open government action plan commitments, and we're hopeful to see that in the new fiscal year.
Finally, our new open government licence, the second version of which was issued last June, is aligned with a Creative Commons licence. It's plain language. It clearly states the conditions for the reuse of data and aligns with all international best practices.
That's a quick primer on open data. Before we go to the demonstration, would you like to ask any questions?
[Translation]
I am wondering if the committee members would like to ask questions.
:
I'm going to start with the page that you can see up on the screen now. This is the home page for data.gc.ca. This is our one stop shop for all of the open data that the Government of Canada makes available at any time to citizens, researchers, voluntary organizations, the private sector, the media. It maintains access and discovery of all open data. It also has some other open government activities, but I'm going to focus mostly on the open data.
The page has been designed with large tiles, as you can see, so that you can easily find what all the features on the site are, so that you can quickly jump to the information that you're looking for. Key, I think, for our conversation today is that tile in the top left-hand corner, the search data.
I'm going to proceed as if I was an average open data user. I click on “search data” and I'm going to pretend that I'm somebody who's looking to buy a new house and I'm interested in what the safety is in the neighbourhood that I'm considering buying a house in. I would type in crime, for example, hit submit, and all the data that is currently made available from the Government of Canada related to crime would come up.
Oftentimes there is a lot of data. We need to be able to help the user filter down those results to a smaller amount, so that they can find what they're looking for a little bit faster. I could reorder the data sets alphabetically or by the date that they were actually created or last modified, and their relevance. I'm going to leave it at relevance for now.
The left-hand side provides a whole variety of filters that can be used to narrow down the search results. I'm going to keep proceeding as if I'm looking for neighbourhood safety information, so I'm going down and see that under subject there's law. I click on law. The number of data sets comes down, still a fair amount, but as I move down the data sets looking for the information I'm looking for, I see crime statistics for Canada, the provinces and the territories, and I know that that's the information that I'm looking for.
I click on that data set and this is the metadata. This slide provides all of the information that we have on that data set, who the publisher is—in this case it's Statistics Canada—what subject it falls under, the date it was last published, and a short description and title of the data set. Those for us are the mandatory metadata fields that must be completed by any department or agency that is making data available.
Before I go into the specific information related to this data set, because I want to point out some of the features for each data set, I want to highlight the licence, which is right here. This licence is a significant point of progress for us working within open data.
As Corinne mentioned, it used to be that individual departments would make their information and data available under a variety of licences, most of which were several pages long and written in legalese that was very difficult to understand by the layman and oftentimes there were specific restrictions on the reuse of that data. For example, most often you couldn't reuse that data commercially.
Our new licence is written in plain language. It's extremely simple. It's based on best practices for open licensing internationally. We are sharing this licence with other jurisdictions within Canada, promoting adoption on a pan-Canadian level, so that data users will be able to bring data together from multiple jurisdictions within Canada at both the provincial and the jurisdictional level, and that can be combined and mashed together.
I'll just go back to the data set and point out a couple more features.
Back before we launched the most recent version of data.gc.ca this past summer, we held a series of round tables across the country with the open data community to hear what it was they would most like to see in the revised, revamped open data portal.
They wanted the ability to rate the data sets themselves and tell us what they thought of the data. They wanted to be able to provide individual comments on that data in the hopes that we could perhaps improve that data. They wanted to be able to share the data easily with others.
All of those features have been incorporated into the new data.gc.ca. You'll see up here on the right side that you can rate the data. It's a five maple-leaf scale. You would simply pick the rating that you're giving the data. You can provide individual comments below and then submit, and it becomes part of the ongoing consumer rating of that data. You can share the data via Facebook, Google, or Twitter, and you can provide comment on the data and share those comments with all other users of that data.
If I want to download the data, I simply click on one of these buttons. The data is made available in different file formats to ensure flexibility of use by the individual users. The data sets are made available in French and English, and there is additional supporting documentation to help the users use the data, and all of these are one-button downloads. Press the button and the data downloads—I won't do that right now.
I should just mention before I leave this page that there's an openness rating down at the bottom. We've incorporated the use of an international openness scale that's used by other jurisdictions to indicate the level of openness of the data sets. It's based on the five-star scale. Most of the data that we hold is three stars and above. This speaks to whether or not the data is being made available in a well-structured format, whether or not you require proprietary software in order to be able to open the data instead of an open software program, and we, the U.S., the U.K., and a variety of other jurisdictions, are using this scale.
If I go back to the search page and pretend that I wasn't able to find the data set that I was looking for, there's a button that says “Can't find what you're looking for?” up at the top. We're very keen to get feedback and information from potential open data users on what data they'd like to see that we haven't yet made available. That helps us to prioritize our work, by working with individual departments to have that data made available. If you didn't have the data and you clicked on that, you'd see a variety of data sets that have already been requested. So you'd look at that first to see if the data that you're looking for has already been requested, and if you see it, you could add your voice to those who have already requested that data.
Behind the scenes what we do is we work with this list and individual departments to find that data and to try to make that data available, and then we update here, on this page, when we've been able to make that data available.
So, for example, here, with the national household survey released in May 2013, now when you click on that it would take you to the actual data set. If you couldn't find the data that you're looking for, you could submit a new data set and it would become part of this list, and again, other individuals would be able to come in after you and add their thumbs-up or their support for getting that data set as well.
Now I'll go back to the home page to show you a couple of other features specific to open data. I'll start with the showcase. We use this area of the site to provide examples and illustrate the use and the utility of open data. We keep a whole section called open data in action, which provides information on specific projects within the Government of Canada, most of which are collaborative, working with other jurisdictions, that use open data specifically to inform a particular policy area.
The oil sands monitoring portal is a joint initiative between Environment Canada here within the federal government and the Alberta government. It specifically focuses on open data. Together the two jurisdictions make more open data available out to the academic world to support greater research.
Also available through the showcase is an apps gallery, which provides access to a comprehensive listing of the apps that have been made available and developed by the Government of Canada using open data. These apps are downloadable for mobile devices.
If I click on the left-hand side, for example, to find a specific app for my phone, I can click on “mobile” and see all of the apps that are currently made available by the Government of Canada for download into mobile phones. “Recalls and safety alerts”, for example, is an app using open data that can be downloaded. I can download the app straight from the site.
I'll give you just a couple more features of the site. About data.gc.ca, I want to point out that a variety of the information resources that are put on this site are for the open data layperson, designed to get them interested in open data and explain what can be done.
We talk about the licence, making it clear that the data that is available can be released and reused on an unrestricted basis. There's a section on frequently asked questions. There's also “Open Data 101”, a handbook on open data to get people who have yet to start really using open data off the ground with the basics of what open data is, how it can used, and how to work with open data.
At the other end of the scale, the site has a developers' corner, which is really for the open data user who has some experience already. These are potential developers, for the most part, people who are interested in building applications using federal data or federal data combined with data from either the private sector or other public sector jurisdictions.
Here we have a little bit more sophisticated information around working with data sets; how to use an application programming interface, a software tool that makes access to data that changes frequently within the federal government more easy to use if you're building an app that will want to access that data on an ongoing basis; information about our metadata element set; and then Open Data 101.
That really brings me to the end of the tour.
[English]
With that we'll go on to the last part of the presentation. We'll jump to page 18 to just give you a wrap-up of the specific initiatives we're working on with our federal government colleagues.
There are three important international initiatives. We've talked a bit about the G-8, the Open Government Partnership, and the International Aid Transparency Initiative.
The Open Government Partnership was by far the first international initiative that we participated in with our signing of the charter and joining the partnership. Then in June there was the G-8. What's to note is that the U.K. was the co-chair of the Open Government Partnership in 2013 and was also, of course, the host for the G-8 summit. They are very strong open data enthusiasts, and we saw the work on the charter, which was quite fruitful.
On the IATI initiative, CIDA has been working with this international initiative, and we're very happy to showcase their work in this regard as part of the open data portal. These are the topics, on page 18, that internationally are of the greatest value, so in fact the sharing of scientific data is very important on an international front.
I'm very pleased to say that Canada is amongst the leaders on open data internationally. We are working on the open data working group. It's co-chaired by us. It was launched in October 2013 by the OGP to support open data work by all OGP member countries. I don't have the exact count of OGP member countries today, but there are over 60 of them. Not all of them are as advanced in their open data efforts as Canada, the U.K., and the U.S. are. Some of them are smaller developing economies and so on, so they benefit quite a bit from our work with them in this regard. The work is focused on the four themes.
As part of the G-8 open data action plan, we have a sub-action plan for the Open Data Charter that was published in February 2014. It commits us to the proactive release of high-value data sets identified by the G-8 countries. We're very pleased that most of those high-value data sets identified by the G-8 were already published by Canada, and we continue to work down the list of the high-value data sets identified by the G-8 to close that gap and work with civil society.
As a result of strong support and sponsorship by , we continue our work on open data. The Canadian Open Data Experience, we are hoping to repeat on an annual basis, and we will certainly also collaborate with our provincial and municipal colleagues whenever we can on their own appathons. We continue to make progress and achieve the commitments we stated in action plan number one and are currently working on the second version of our action plan on open government, which is a requirement of our membership in the OGP. That will be published towards the fall.
Open data in Canada is an important, ambitious commitment. As part of our work on action plan number one, we were asked to make an ambitious commitment for open data in Canada. What we proposed was that we work to get to common licensing terms across Canada in all provincial, territorial, and municipal jurisdictions on the use of open data. We already have four provinces and a number of municipalities. Quebec and its municipalities also announced their own initiatives, in February in fact, in the same form of licence as ours, so they're now in the same fold. We continue to work with the remaining provinces and territories and municipalities to make open data in Canada a reality, which will allow us to really mash up data with the same licensing terms across all jurisdictions in Canada.
The work of the Open Data Institute has not yet begun as it was just announced, but we are working with the founders and will be strong collaborators for their work to ensure that we, as the federal government, benefit and that all citizens benefit in this.
We will continue to chair the OGP open data working group, as well as continuing our work on the G-8.
I talked about CODE, so I will jump over that.
We are in the process of developing, with input from civil society, action plan number two for the Open Government Partnership. We are going to focus, in the second version of the action plan, on implementing our directive on open government during the upcoming fiscal year, certainly accelerating the release of other high-value data sets and more appathons.
If we're able, over the next fiscal year we will probably come to a third version of our portal. It is an open source portal. It is supported by work that is done internationally and with our partners in the U.S. and India. We're the source of the portal but we're also working internationally with the U.K., I think, on greater search capabilities and other features in the portal.
Of course we'll continue our work on international standards for data and metadata and the interoperability of the data sets between jurisdictions.
On page 23 there's just a bit more description of what our ambitious commitment to open data in Canada is all about. But again, it's about harmonizing our work across Canada, and it would be quite significant for us to achieve that. It would certainly be very useful to civil society to be able to tap data sets across Canada without any challenge to usability or licensing. We're certainly looking for a federated discovery approach that will allow a Canadian to perhaps enter through B.C.'s open data portal or Ontario's open data portal and find the right data, be it from Ontario, B.C., or the federal government, or any municipality, and work with that.
This movement has seen a very strong collaborative philosophy. It's really the basis of open data. It's all about collaboration among all levels of government and civil society and the private sector. It's really very exciting, and we're very pleased with our results.
We talked about the Open Data Institute, and we will look forward to its progress. It does have partners including OpenText, Communitech, and the University of Waterloo, so it certainly includes the private sector as well as the academic sector in developing our work, similar to what has been done in Britain and in the U.S.
On page 25 there is a little bit of work on our OGP open data working group. We've already shared our open data experience with a number of OECD countries. I think we shared it with Colombia, as I recall, and we're also sharing with Mexico. In fact Canada is quite determined to continue to collaborate in this regard. On page 26 I've mentioned this.
With that I think we've touched on all the key points about our work on open data. I certainly hope that we have advanced your understanding of the key concepts and the value of this, and of our efforts and our achievements from a federal government perspective.
With that, we're happy to answer any further questions you may have.