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Ontario Wants to Share Its Data
But the province wants your help deciding which information should be shared first.
Screenshot from www.ontario.ca.
Perhaps you’d like to take a look at data related to regulated provincial parks and conservation reserves. Maybe you’d like to scrutinize information related to water safety, or electrical demand, or the number of health and safety complaints received by the Ministry of Labour. Well, you’re in luck (or will soon be in luck): the province is in possession of a huge number of statistics, and it intends to make its data open by default, “limiting access only to protect privacy, security and confidentiality.”
It’s already made 170 data sets available through its open data catalogue, but has another 1,000 (mostly) ready to go—and it wants you to vote for your preferred data sets to determine the order in which they’ll be made public. You can browse them by ministry or topic (business and economy, environment and energy, health and wellness, etc.), and review which ones have already received the most votes—ones called “Ministry program budgets and expenditures” and “public sector salary disclosure” appear to have inspired a great deal of interest.
The voting does not have a cut-off date: it will be ongoing, and the government will be preparing and opening data sets on a regular basis.