More Open Data projects for Canadians
Two great new sites have just launched this month that will help Canadians have easier access to Federal government data.
openparliament.ca was launched on April 12th, by Michael Mulley, a Montreal-based web designer. It provides a simple and attractive interface from which to find data culled from the Hansard (aka, official Debates) of the House of Commons. You can browse by MP or search by name or postal code. The main focus of the site is to keep citizens informed about the work of parliamentarians and its most useful feature to that end is its hyperlinked list of topics under current debate. Are you curious to know what MPs were debating about most recently? According to Mulley, who has taken his information from the April 16th Hansard, topics included:
- ethics
- Afghanistan
- Fairness at the Pump
- sealing industry
- Canada Post
- agriculture
- Chile
- the environment
- wine industry
- and much more!
If datasets are your thing, check out http://www.datadotgc.ca/ Launched by David Eaves on April 14th, this site provides a home to a growing list of federal government datasets. You can see which ministries share their data and which do not and you can see how many datasets each ministry has provided. At present the lion’s share of available data come from Natural Resources Canada, but as the open data movement grows in Canada we will likely see more content added from other departments. Supports keyword searching and you can browse by ministry or by tags.