Comments on: Open Data in Edmonton? Follow Vancouver’s lead

By: Don Iveson :: Edmonton City Councillor, Ward 5

Don Iveson :: Edmonton City Councillor, Ward 5 — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:25:32 +0000

[...] administration. It will likely come back to Council’s Executive Committee early next year. Mack Male and others connected to Change Camp and Bar/Demo Camp have been advocating for this and I’ve [...]

By: Mack D. Male

Mack D. Male — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:43:01 +0000

Yep, that’s sort of what I was getting at in this post – most of the data is already being made available in some form or another, so it’s not like we’re asking for the impossible. We just need an overall strategy in place to ensure that when data is made available, it is made available in an open, accessible way (and to take all of the existing data and make it available in appropriate, open formats).

By: Grank

Grank — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:23:33 +0000

As you know this is something I’ve been wanting for a long time and the main reason you and I ever spoke, or I started reading your blog or twitter or anything… I think great strides were made when you successfully petitioned ETS for their transit data, though as we’ve discussed I think the limited and flawed data they send to Google is still insufficient compared with the abundance of proper transit data ETS itself has. ENTS has a relationship with the City of Edmonton, and it does sound like people like Chris Moore are intrigued by the possibilities of data openness, but it’s a concept that has yet to even be heard by a lot of the people “in charge” of a lot of the data. I mean hell, the City of Edmonton Maps page to which you link is pretty hard to consume, since it requires full SVG which sadly no browser fully supports… and there’s no easy way to get the data out of it anyway. I would be happy if all the data in that Maps page was freely available in reusable formats. Which would just make sense since they’re making it available anyway, and they’re obviously doing some sort of conversion from their data source because they’re not storing it natively as SVG…