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Unlike the United States and Britain, Canada has no open data strategy - and neither do we have a central, searchable catalogue of the open government data that is available. Rather than wait for our government to catch up, the team of citizens behind DataDotGC.ca decided to build their own website to show government how it could be done.

Open government data is used by coders, researchers, mapping software, game designers, entrepreneurs, and other citizens -- and by government itself, of course. (This latter group is often left out of conversations about who's using open data, but the fact is that the dense and obscure navigation of most government websites hides available data from government employees as well as from the public.)

DataDotGC.ca is perhaps the most collaborative project we've ever worked on. Beyond the inherently co-operative nature of the resulting site - which relies on site visitors contributing information about the location of government data sets (a beautiful example of crowdsourcing) - the back-end of the site was built with the assistance of a diverse group of people from the UK and Canada. And it's built in layers, with the catalogue info itself (e.g. title, location, ministry, license details, etc.) stored in a database called CKAN (the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network), which provides a central, international catalogue for government data from around the world. The Canadian data in CKAN gets pulled into DataDotGC.ca via Drupal, thanks to the wizardry of Raised Eyebrow's development team (and some big help from the team behind the UK data portal at data.gov.uk).

The site allows visitors to browse data by ministry or by tags, and to search the datasets as well. Beyond its function as an online catalogue, the site also displays a chart of the various federal government ministries that shows the number of datasets shared by each one. (Natural Resources, with its abundance of mapping data, is well in the lead at the time of writing this.)

The site continues to evolve, too, with another layer of interactivity under development (and planned for a Summer 2010 release): Soon, visitors to DataDotGC.ca will be able to browse through data tables - and even run queries - from within the website itself (i.e. without having to download the data set in question). We're working with Microsoft's open-source Open Government Data Initiative to develop an OGDI module for Drupal that will create a unique three-way integration between Drupal, OGDI and CKAN.

Our hope for this project is that it will encourage our governments to release information about our country and ourselves more freely, and make the data that is currently available much easier to find.

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