Strata Week: New Open-Data Initiatives in Canada and the UK

Audrey Watters | O'Reilly Radar | December 1, 2011

Embassy Magazine broke the news this week that all of Statistics Canada's online data will be made available to the public for free, released under the Government of Canada's Open Data License Agreement beginning in February 2012. Statistics Canada is the federal agency commissioned with producing statistics to help understand the Canadian economy, culture, resources, and population. (It runs the Canadian census every five years.)

Embassy Magazine broke the news this week that all of Statistics Canada's online data will be made available to the public for free, released under the Government of Canada's Open Data License Agreement beginning in February 2012. Statistics Canada is the federal agency commissioned with producing statistics to help understand the Canadian economy, culture, resources, and population. (It runs the Canadian census every five years.)

The decision to make the data freely and openly available "has been in the works for years," according to Statistics Canada spokesperson Peter Frayne. The Canadian government did launch an open-data initiative earlier this year, and the move on the part of StatsCan dovetails philosophically with that. Frayne said that the decision to make the data free was not a response to the controversial decision last summer when the agency dropped its mandatory long-form census.

Open government activist David Eaves responds with a long list of "winners" from the decision, including all of the consumers of StatsCan's data...