Accelerating progress in open spatial data infrastructure at the municipal level in Canada

At the SDI Summit in Quebec City Gordon Plunkett offered an interesting perspective on the penetration of open spatial data infrastructure (SDI) at the municipal level in Canada.  Local governments are traditionally responsible for local services such as safety, infrastructure, environment, and recreation that directly impact citizens' daily life. But citizens are often not aware of available services. To increase citizen engagement local governments should make their services more easy to use, understandable, and relevant by providing them in visual form via web pages and web apps.

Background

Open data has been gathering momentum among governments initially driven by United States Federal Government data being in the public domain (since 1909.) The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California state and counties, and by the City of Vancouver and other cities.  In 2013 G8 leaders (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union) signed a charter on open data.  The Ordnance Survey in the UK began releasing some of its data with open licensing as part of its OpenData initiative in 2010, but it wasn't until 2018 that the OS Mastermap was made openly available for the public and businesses to use. But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. In the U.S. Data.gov was launched in late 2009.  In 2013, President Obama issued an Executive Order making open and machine readable the new default for federal government information in the United States.

In Canada the Government of Canada announced its Open Government Action Plan in 2012.  The fundamental principle was a government-wide directive making government information and data available to the public by default. Geospatial has led the development of open data in Canada.  Of the 80,000+ datasets that are available on the federal government's open data portal, 69,000+ are geospatial. Currently in addition to the federal government eleven provinces and territories and over 60 municipalities have open data portals. At the municipal level Vancouver has been in the forefront of municipal open data - Vancouver's open data portal was initiated in September 2009.  In November 2009  the City of Toronto launched Toronto.ca/open, the City of Toronto's official beta data set catalogue, which provided open access to city data.  In January 2010 the City of Edmonton opened Edmonton's open data catalogue, which made city data including geospatial data openly available.  In 2010 Ottawa created an Open Data Ottawa site to encourage digital innovation, improved service delivery, and stimulation of economic growth.

A major motivation for open data has been government transparency.  But there is also evidence that open geospatial data contributes to the economy.  In 2008  Australia and later New Zealand commissioned studies of the contribution of spatial data to the national economy that have concluded that with appropriate government policies the contribution to the GDP, estimated to be on the order of 1%, could be doubled.  In 2015 Natural Resources Canada released the Canadian Geomatics Environmental Scan and Economic Value Study that estimated the contribution of the geospatial sector to the Canadian economy to be on the order of $21 billion.

Current state of open SDIs in Canada

Interoperability is key for an effective SDI. The inability to easily share data is a serious constraint on the value that can be derived from it. Gordon presented a simple SDI interoperability maturity matrix. Most municipalities probably fit into what he called syntactic interoperability, the ability to share data using common file formats and APIs.  Some have ventured in sharing data at the semantic level, which means recognizing content through shared data models such as the Canadian Municipal Data Model (CMDM), National Road Network (NRN), and NENA standards for 9-1-1.  A few are venturing into addressing the issue of different names for the same objects in different jurisdictions or in different disciplines.

Patterns of use for SDI include mapping and visualization, monitoring, field mobility, data management, analytics, sharing and collaboration, decision support, citizen engagement, and design and planning. 

Perhaps the top challenge for local governments, who hold the data that is most directly relevant to citizens, is making them aware of what is available and how to use is to address their every day concerns. Gordon presented some examples across Canada of interesting open data portals: Kamloops, British Columbia; Saint John, New Brunswick; Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, which have made a lot of geospatial and other data available on open portals; St Albert, Alberta which enables citizens to report broken infrastructure and track progress in resolving issues; Regina, Saskatchewan which also makes a lot of data available on an open portal; Red River Planning District, whose site is heavily used during the annual Red River flood season; Brampton, Ontario, a poster child for open data and citizen engagement; Repentigny, Quebec, which enables users to easily determine the availability of municipal services close to where they live or intend to live; Prince Edward Island Hydro, which shows current electricity outages; and Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, whose portal include a parcel map in addition to roads and other basic map layers.

I would suggest that another data layer that should be part of every comprehensive SDI and that is missing in virtually all local, provincial, and federal SDIs is accurate maps of underground infrastructure in public right-of-ways.  Not knowing the location of underground cables and pipes has important implications for citizen safety and the reliable delivery of essential services.

In summary, local governments are traditionally responsible for local services such as safety, infrastructure, environment, and recreation that directly impact citizens' daily life. But citizens are often not aware of available services.  Local government can improve citizen engagement by making their services to more easy to use, understandable, and relevant by providing them in visual form via web pages and web apps.