Civicaccess.ca has had numerous discussion on this topic.
Geogratis and GeoBase are freedata organizations at the federal
government level and have been for more than a decade. The Atlas of
Canada was the first national open source web atlas, and the Feds at
NRCan have been building our geospatial data infrastructure using open
standards. Their unrestricted user license is ground breaking in
Canada (
http://www.geobase.ca/geobase/en/licence.jsp) and I believe
can be adopted by the City. These are the solid research and
documents from whence it came - Version 2 of The Dissemination of
Government Geographic Data in Canada - Guide to Best Practices
http://www.geoconnections.org/publications/Best_practices_guide/Guide_to_Best_Practices_Summer_2008_Final_EN.pdf.
Recently, the GEOSS developed the following: *Toward Implementation of
the Global Earth Observation System of Systems Data Sharing
Principles*, by Paul F. Uhlir, Robert S. Chen, Joanne Irene,
Gabrynowicz & Katleen Janssen
http://www.spacelaw.olemiss.edu/JSL/articles/35JSL201.pdf
In discussion with data librarians, there is a sentiment that city
open data are being shared missing metadata, in the case of geodata
missing projections, and context for the datasets. I am awaiting
information from a U of T librarian who has been instrumental in this
topic to share his observations. I believe it is important to include
some specialists, especially data librarians who have been liberating
data for a long time and who have developed good practices.
I really like David Eaves' work, except for an interview I just read
where he states that with citizen access to public data the need for
journalists will disappear. I greatly disagree, we need well
resourced investigative journalism more than ever. As we cannot
expect the public sector to cover issues beyond their immediate
mandates, nor can we expect business to do beyond its plan, we cannot
expect citizens to cover all issues in a deep way, we also need the
third sector and we need academics, and we need funding.
Also, I believe that David Fewer at CIPPIC is working on open data and
I have just recently heard they have people looking at geodata.
Cheers
Tracey
On 1 déc, 20:44, "Aubrie (Abby) McGibbon" <
amcgib...@storm.ca> wrote:
> Greetings all.
>
> I just received an email from the city inviting me to attend an
> information session to be given in the next few weeks prior to the
> release of the open data policy as well as the soft launch in the
> first quarter of 2010.
>
> To this end, are there any issues, topic areas, specific questions, or
> perspectives that you would like to see covered, clarified, asked or
> added to the agenda?
>
> Feel free to post here and/or email me -
amcgib...@storm.ca