HomeZilla’s Open Data Wish List
Open data is coming to Canada, being lead byOpen Data Vancouver and Open Data Toronto. Osh from 5 Blocks Out has a fantastic post about Open Data: What’s on Your Wish List? and inspired HomeZilla to voice our desires for open data.
The first ‘wish/tenant’ that 5 Blocks Out mentioned was:
If you’re publishing it for humans, publish it for machines too. We need data in machine-readable open standard formats like JSON, XML, CSV, iCal, and so on. Not just PDF.
We at HomeZilla couldn’t agree more! We have spent a lot of money for people to ‘re-type’ PDFs into a more usable format. Please government…stop releasing ONLY PDF versions of data…instead release the raw data as well.
The three things Osh asked for were:
- Lists of places, including place name and location information.
- Event data
- TTC route, stop, and vehicle location information.
And two of those are things HomeZilla wants as well. Our top five requests for open data would be:
- Lists of public places, including place name and an exact latitude & longitude.
- Public transit routes, stops, and make sure to include multiple door entrances for stations
- City election bounds, polling stations, and vote counts for as many years as possible.
- nvironmentally ‘monitored’ locations (gas stations, recycling, land fills, etc)
- Building permits and building applications
One big difference between our posts is that HomeZilla needs this data for all of Canada. Getting data for one city is good but Canada wide data is fantastic! For Open Data to go nationwide, the mind set of sharing data will have to change from ‘never give it out’ to ‘always give it out’…and that mind shift is happening but it will take a while. Governments can help this by getting on TV, radio, Twitter, and telling people… “Share your data! Not sure what to share, research it quickly then give it away!”
HomeZilla wants our top five sets of data listed above…but causing a mind shift in sharing data is even more important!
September 29th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Sandy, thanks for this post. More companies, nonprofits and individual developers need to start articulating what, exactly, they want from government open data.
Hopefully success in Vancouver, Nanaimo and Toronto will spark the movement for open data in other municipalities and at other levels of government. This will take a movement. Thanks for being part of it.
October 5th, 2009 at 11:24 am
[...] has posted an open data wish list that refers back to Osh Momoh’s list. Nice to have the people who are using the data saying [...]
October 7th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Great list, Sandy. Thanks for sharing it.