Canadian open data portal | Hacker News Reader

Canadian open data portal

open.canada.ca

104 pointsbryanrasmussen23 comments

Like so many other kinds of national leadership, it occurs to me that the current US administration's restriction, removal and tainting of data (remember the panicked surge of downloads of science data after the election, and the restrictions on what words the CDC can use, and whether "climate change" can be uttered by Interior Department staff) is going to shift the center of "reliable data" outside the US to places like Canada and Europe. Heck, even China can decide to play in that space.

And so the US reduces its voice and influence in yet another area. One example will be that citations of US data will decline; being reminded less and less of US data, researchers and similar will tend not to look for it in the first place.

While I agree with you, I just wanted to point out, that Canada isn't clean here either. While I don't really remember all the details, the previous government had a particularly poor reputation for destroying records and attempting to control the narrative on government funded research.

Quick reference article: https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/4w578d/the-harper-governm...

I remember that too. While the triggering example was the Canadian site, my concerns are more about America's loss of credibility relative to the world, not Canada specifically.

I also understand that the science censorship issues in Canada have begun to swing back the other way, but I'm not sure if that's because of their current administration or if it began before that.

Of the 5 or 6 I clicked on, I was only able to find one with actual data. Most seem to just be a record of the data that exists, but not a source of the data.

For example, fire stations in Canada has 35 'thumbs up' but no actual data available (http://open.canada.ca/en/search/inventory/reference/tcod-201...)

Using the `Open Government Portal`/`Open Data Portal` rather than the `Open Data Inventory` will result in a more intuitive view of available data sets and their formats.

Keep in mind, the language used is to make the information as accessible as possible to the largest possible range of interested parties. So if you're to ask why such an inventory exists, the answer would be that any number of differing purposes exist for any number of potential inquiries. IE—not everybody who wants information from this kind of database is an engineer or scientist.

I think the ratio is heavily influenced by the submitting department. The thumbs ups are 'upvotes' back to the submitting body that they should prioritize this dataset.

If you're really interested, you can pull down the csv data set and sort by date released.

Ideally, a government should be a set of APIs that can be used not just for retrieving data, but also for performing various actions, e.g. updating home address, registering a company, requesting a new driver's license, etc. Permissions for authorized 3rd parties can be assigned through digital certificates. Outsourcing government functions to 3rd parties will create competition and reduce state expenses.

I wonder if Canadian or any other government has a similar vision.

Anybody interested in these data sets will probably also appreciate GeoGratis:

http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/geography/topographic-...

As part of the ongoing government wide Web Renewal efforts, please note that as of August 31, 2017, the GeoGratis Catalogue and Search tools will no longer be available. As of that date, you should consult the Open Government of Canada search tool.

The framework is still in use to display geographic and topographical data in the Open Data portal.

Geogratis is being shuttered on December 31st, the WMS services will be gone.

For an international comparison, the Global Open Data Index ranks countries based on the open government data made available. Canada ranks well at number 5 (jointly with Finland and Norway).

https://index.okfn.org/place/

One of the most striking columns in that list is the "Government Spending" column. It is red all over the place, including top two in the list - Taiwan and Australia!

These data might be impacted by Canada's stance on disclosure:

> Last week the Canadian finance ministers announced that federal, provincial, and territorial governments will require companies to keep information on beneficial owners that can be made available to authorities. In the same week, all 28 EU members agreed to make such information publicly available on registries and to make beneficial owners of trusts available to authorities.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/how-much-real-estate...

That data will never be released to the public, even if they do intend to actually gather it properly. The Canadian economy needs foreign money to not fall into recession.

Was there a recent update or improvement here? They've had this going for a few years now..

Not really, I hadn't noticed it before, and came across it so I posted.

    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
    <html><head>
    <title>400 Bad Request</title>
    </head><body>
    <h1>Bad Request</h1>
    <p>Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.<br />
    Request header field is missing ':' separator.<br />
    <pre>
    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chro</pre>
    </p>
    </body></html>

A broken request parser? What a lovely first impression.

I can confirm that it is broken for me on Firefox Nightly and Chrome.

Worked fine for me: Firefox Quantum 57.0.1 (Mac OS X)

No problems here on Safari/MacOS

Seems like it's oscillating, maybe there's one misconfigured node somewhere which is being swapped in by Varnish?

obviously worked find for me or I wouldn't have posted it, Firefox Developer 58.0b11

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