Government Operations Committee on May 8th, 2014

[Diane Nadeau]

We have, however the information that we have put open on the site is not using RDF. We understand that there are a lot of RDF schemas out. It's part of the information I was talking to you about in my script. For example, the legal RDF has a basic vocabulary that contains more than 1,500 standards for documents, contacts, economies—those types of things. I believe also you have an XBRL for financial information. There are all kinds of information out there that we're not using.

[Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Well, I do worry that if everyone does their own thing then it's going to be very hard for the end-user to access information in multiple formats. Hopefully the working group will wrestle that one to the ground.

Mr. Hume, I'm curious about the vision for open data. We've heard from a number of people. I don't think we're posting open data “just because”. There has to be a benefit to it, a practical benefit. How would you describe the practical benefit to British Columbians of what you're doing?

[David Hume]

I think the practical benefit is mainly about.... I'm going to try to describe this in a couple of different ways.

One is the opportunity that open data provides to help people be successful in the things that they want to do themselves. For example, in my case of the education application that I told you about, the Minister of Education published open data and then used that data to create a service for parents that helps them understand the data profile of various schools. That allowed me and my wife to look, in a really logical and effective way, at the different kinds of performance measures, quality indicators, student satisfaction surveys, test results, and other kinds of things about schools in our areas.

My kids are four and two. We were going to buy a house and we wanted to make sure that we were close to a school that we felt would be good. We had limited opportunity to go and see and visit those different schools. It was the best information that we could get our hands on that would allow us to understand what those schools are like. That's, I think, a really practical benefit of open data.

It really allows governments to be able to take data.... When we publish our data openly it means we can consume it ourselves and apply our own creativity and use it in different service capacities, in ways that really make it relevant to people.

It just gets easier for us to do that when the data is published openly in a consumable way. We spend less time trying to organize it, find it, manipulate it, pull it out of reports. We can just go get it and we can start to do things with it. There are real benefits in that.

[Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

That's a good example.

Ms. Nadeau, I noticed in your remarks that you talked about trying to get funding from academia and ACOA for some of your work. I'm curious as to whether there's a budget being set aside by the Government of New Brunswick for this work?

At this point do you have an envelope you're working with? Is there some base funding for you?

[Diane Nadeau]

Currently, no, there is no funding. As I said, this is put on hold. We had funding for proof of concept, and that was it. We were supposed to be able to find somebody in the industry to take this over, but we haven't found anybody to take this over.

[Diane Ablonczy, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Interesting.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

I will now go back to Mr. Ravignat.

Mr. Ravignat, you have five minutes.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

While addressing the usability of data with different formats and so forth is definitely a crucial point, so is the usefulness of that data. A lot of the data made available on the open portal by the federal government is geospatial data, and of course it depends on the quality of the data that is produced.

This study also concerns whether or not data is socially useful. As you know, the government did away with the long form census at Statistics Canada. I was wondering whether or not either of you had an opinion with regard to what that has done, from your perspective, to the quality of data available from the federal government.

[David Hume]

Sure. It's difficult for me to speak on the issue because I'm not responsible for the B.C. statistics agency. I can tell you certainly there is a lot of expert opinion out there that the results of that decision had made the usefulness of that data more challenging. The exact impacts of that I'm not totally clear on because I'm not very close to that issue, but I think you would hear in the experts the challenge of using that data.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Ms. Nadeau, what do you think about this issue?

[Diane Nadeau]

What I understand is that the long form census for census data is used to provide funding for the right programs in the right regions. Yes, probably open data could replace some of the analysis in order to replace that form. That's what I'm thinking right now that could be done. I would have to do a little bit more research to find out if I'm totally correct in my assumption.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you.

I still want to talk about the relationship between open data and access to information. I don't know if either of you has expertise with regard to the relationship between putting data available as quickly as possible to the public and the growing requests, at least at the federal level, for access to information. I don't know if there is an equivalent provincially, where providing this data may actually help reduce the number and the complexity of the requests for access to information.

Mr. Hume, would you like to start?

[David Hume]

In certain cases it has. Open data is in a language of freedom of information, or access to information, as a kind of proactive disclosure. Certainly when we have made data publicly available, that has allowed us to deal with requesters, and I'll refer them to things.

But to be clear, that doesn't stop them making the request, right? In British Columbia we have seen a real increase in freedom of information requests over the last number of years, which has been a challenge to manage. Open data does offer us a vehicle to be able to kind of refer people off to be able to access information when it is available. But as I say, it hasn't minimized the number of requests.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Ms. Nadeau, do you have any comments on this?

[Diane Nadeau]

I would like to add that we had a reduction committee in 2005. That committee required a catalogue with the government's fees, which needed to be published on the website.

While working with the committee, we realized that it wanted to have access to information other than the fees. It wanted to have the description of services, contact information, and so on. Instead of providing a catalogue with fees, we created a directory with all the services, which we posted on the site.

Right now, 850 government services are published in the same format. As a result, public requests for information have dropped as the information is already on the site.

I know that we had a lot of requests at the very beginning. Then, over the years, the public has pretty much figured out how to use the site. As a result, we have had fewer and fewer questions. That was a real success.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for that answer.

Mr. Adler now has the floor.

You have five minutes.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Nadeau, earlier you referred to the example of Sam Walton saying that information is more important than inventory. Walmart has really proved that case. I don't know if you have been to Bentonville, Arkansas, and seen the actual Walmart facility, but it is run like a military operation. It's kind of a nerve centre. They do have all kinds of weather reports coming in. It resembles very much a Pentagon kind of operation. Ms. Nadeau, you talked about making a business case in developing a strategic plan on open data, to make a business case for the release of specific data.

I want to ask Mr. Hume this. Is all of the data that British Columbia releases free, or does some of it have to be paid for?

[David Hume]

On the DataBC site, you will be able to get that data for free. For some datasets, you are getting copies of the data rather than access to the raw data. If you wanted full access to the data then you would have to pay.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

How is that data valued? What is taken into account to place a specific valuation on that data?

[David Hume]

Usually the valuation is associated with the creation and maintenance of the data. So if you take, for example, a dataset like our base geographic data or a digital road atlas, there are a number of different partners that will typically come together to fund the creation and ongoing maintenance of that data.

If you think about something like roads, the datasets get built but they also need to be continually reviewed and ensured that they are properly done. There are also all kinds of levels associated with data that come along with that: telemetry, the aerial photos. There are multiple kinds of data associated with those things. So it's in the creation of that where most of the.... It's in trying to recover for those costs where there is often payment.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

Is it pretty much run on a cost-recovery basis or is there any profit?

[David Hume]

It's pretty much run on cost recovery.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

It is. Is there any thought to make it a profit centre and to actually make money off this data? I'm assuming that some of the data that goes out is contracted out to a variety of different companies that will organize this data, make some sense of it, and make it available back to the government, and then the government charges for it on a cost-recovery basis.

[David Hume]

It kind of works like that.

Just to put it slightly differently, we would pay people to go and collect the data, to bring it back to us. That intellectual property lies with government once it's done. It's collected by contractors on our behalf. I would say that there's....

Here's the thing about open data as a philosophy. There's a basic principle there that you create more wealth by sharing the data than you would by selling it. So you create more market efficiencies by sharing data openly without asking people to pay for it, the assumption being that you've paid your taxes so you've paid for the data.

[Mark Adler, Conservative, York Centre, ON]

I agree with you on that. I don't think it should be necessarily sold or privatized. What I am saying, though, is there are data brokers out there who collect on behalf of private companies and resell this data and it's a very big business—