Embassy Magazine
(recently) broke the story that
all of Statistics Canada's online data will not only be made free,
but released under the Government
of Canada's Open Data License Agreement
(updated and reviewed earlier
this week) that allows for commercial re-use.
The
above from Eaves.ca, he goes on to say (in
part).....
(T)here may be
tougher news on the horizon for StatsCan. With every department
required to have submitted proposal to
cut their budgets by either 5% and 10%,
and with StatsCan having already seen a
number of its programs cut, there may be
fewer resources in the organization to take advantage of the
opportunity making its data open creates, or even just adjust to what
has happened.........
The winners from
this decision are of course, consumers of statscan's data.
Indirectly, this includes all of us, since provincial and local
governments are big consumers of statscan data and so now - assuming
it is structured in such a manner - they will have easier (and
cheaper) access to it..........
The first thing
everybody will be waiting for is to see exactly what data gets
shared, in what structure and to what detail.........
Therein lays the rub,
announcements are all very fine but exactly what will be included and
how long will it be until all data is available is something we must
wait and see what happens. All to often both government and other
users are basing their decisions on data that is anywhere from a few
months old to 5 or 6 years old, we all know that statistical
information on (for instance) family incomes from the 2006 census is
utterly useless in todays economy. Given the governments failure to
retain the mandatory portion of the long form census care must be
taken to get too excited about free data that may be less than
accurate due to poor input data.
All in all its a step
in the right direction but we wonder how the reduction in revenue
coupled with the across the board departmental cuts will impact their
ability to collect and analyze data.
NOW how about data from
all the other government departments being made freely available,
particularly on where and how all out tax dollars are being spent AND
access to documents requested through freedom of information requests
being actually provided in a timely and open manner. Opening up
access to Statscan data whist handicapping their ability to collect
accurate data and making it ever more difficult to get information
and data from other government departments may just be another one of
those Harper regimes smoke screens. Time will tell!
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