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Toronto Exposes Its Data
On Monday, Torontoist spent the day at the Toronto Innovation Showcase at City Hall, learning about data sets, queues, and civic engagement. At the top of the agenda was the unveiling of toronto.ca/open, Toronto’s new open catalogue of city data, ranging from—as Mayor Miller explained in a press release on Monday morning—”apartment inspection data to child care availability to dozens of GIS mapping data that will enable a broad range of location-based applications. And yes,” he added, “our initial data offering also includes the TTC’s scheduling data.”
Who knew that TTC schedule and stop metadata could be so engrossing?
In the afternoon, during the open data lab, attendees had the opportunity to talk with City experts about the data, and brainstorm ideas for new applications and mashups. While City officials weren’t able to answer all of the attendees’ questions about data availability and updates, we learned that some data sets, like GIS mapping, will be updated daily, while others, like child care centres, will be updated only when necessary.
Some developers were concerned about the TTC’s data (to be refreshed every six weeks), which was released as text files, a format that many felt might create a barrier to new applications. Robert Miller, a TTC IT developer, assured us that the TTC plans to release the data in other formats soon. Real-time data is on the way too, but the TTC first wants to “get over the hump of launching its trip planner,” which should be available by December.
This map of licenced child care centres in Toronto was built using the same child care centre data available at toronto.ca/open.
Another data set that received a lot of attention was the City’s child care centre information; participants with kids were especially excited at the prospect of using the data to create a child care space sharing application, which would allow parents who only need child care for a few days a week to find and share child care spaces with other neighbourhood parents. Other ideas included a multi-modular trip planner, an embeddable City event calendar, and a phone app that could be used anywhere in the city to find out when the next TTC bus is coming. (The lattermost of which, of course, received a round of applause.)
Flip charts = democracy.
While the open data lab was the focus of the event, the showcase also featured exhibits on how the City is using data and new technologies to improve its services. We stopped by the University of Toronto’s booth, where computer science graduate students were demonstrating Q-me, a program designed to eliminate the tedious lineups at municipal offices. Their solution: text messages.
“Our technology allows people to spend the wait room time more productively or comfortably by allowing them to leave the physical waiting room and be paged when their turn is near,” the Q-me brochure explains. “This is accomplished by assigning an identifier to a person when they first enter the waiting room, and sending a text message to their mobile phone when they near the front of the queue.” People can also use the system to enter queues online. At the moment, the team is still looking at ways to implement this technology in the public sector, before exploring its potential in the private sector.
Toronto EMS’s booth at the Toronto Innovation Showcase.
We also visited Toronto EMS’s booth and talked with Emergency Medical Dispatcher Nick Kuzyk about SIREN, EMS’s new monitoring and dispatch system, which uses real-time data to display the location of all EMS vehicles and then uses historic demand models to coordinate vehicle deployment. SIREN also decides who to send to an emergency through a series of complex calculations, including, but not limited to, distance from a call, call priority, crew type, and length of time in station. According to Kuzyk, SIREN allows EMS to more effectively deploy its resources, while reducing dispatch process times from two to three minutes, to less than three seconds.
In the end, the Toronto Innovation Showcase was a resounding success. Although the City’s initial data offerings were a tad meagre (so far, only a small fraction has been released, with plans to release more in the upcoming weeks and months; the City is urging citizens to make data requests at DataTO.org, so it knows what to prioritize) most attendees saw Monday’s announcement as a first step towards something greater and applauded the City’s commitment to open government. “I’m surprised that the City got as much data available as they did,” Oshoma Momoh, one of the developers behind the community website 5 Blocks Out, told Torontoist. “I’m also excited by the number of City staff here, and that they weren’t cajoled into being here, but are actually engaged.”
All photos, unless otherwise noted, by Stephen Michalowicz/Torontoist.