Today, the Toronto Open Data Lab was held at Toronto’s City Hall. The lab talked about Toronto’s Open Data Catalogue which makes the HomeZilla team very excited.

We have already integreated Toronto’s Open Data for Parks and Toronto’s Open Data for Child Care. Both of these data sets have increased the quality of HomeZilla’s data.

The Toronto Parks data added 28% new parks to HomeZilla’s database and the Child Care data added 5% new locations. But the real benefit for HomeZilla is in the data maintenance. The City of Toronto will be producing this fantastic information and saving HomeZilla the cost of collecting the data.

Of course, with any new source of data there will be little problems with usage. Luckily with Toronto’s Open Data HomeZilla there are ‘good’ problems. Usually the problem to draw bounding lines by hand; I don’t have a painter’s steady hand. But with the parks data the biggest problem was the Rosedale Ravine Trail, which is huge, was broken into eight segments.

So, HomeZilla had to decide:

• what is the centre point of the park?
• should we combine the eight polygons?
• should we list it as eight different parks?

For us, they were FANTASTIC problems to have so hats off to the City of Toronto.

To help contribute to the community, HomeZilla has converted two of the ESRI Shapefiles into KML files for people to download. These should be great quality because of the source but we make no promises so use ‘as-is’ but we would love feedback.

You can down load the KML files here:

• Toronto Address Points in KML source Open Toronto.
• Toronto Parks in KML source Open Toronto.

Go Open Data!

This entry was posted Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Corporate Update, Open Data, Technology. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.