Government Operations committee  With the open portal, as I said in my script, having access to standards.... Just having the Government of New Brunswick trying to find out all of the different standards we should have, analyze them, and use them, is a huge project. Why should we do this, when all of the governments in Canada need to do it?

Government Operations committee  Yes, it would be great if the federal government would elaborate on the privacy policy more, and then all of the provincial and municipal governments could use it. Today we do share information about health with the University of New Brunswick. It is quite difficult to decide the information that cannot be traced back to the person.

Government Operations committee  Would you like me to answer the question, Mrs. Day?

Government Operations committee  In New Brunswick, we currently have online training. In the past, we had a program—and I forget the name—that allowed the public to have access to online services. To go back to the education sector, I am not aware of everything that goes on. As you mentioned, universities share some medical courses.

Government Operations committee  As I said earlier, the second step is to study the data and determine which can be open. We need resources to change the way things are being done today. We must decide whether the system needs to be redone or whether a new capacity simply needs to be added. In New Brunswick, since our resources are quite limited, we must be prudent in our approach.

Government Operations committee  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.

Government Operations committee  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.

Government Operations committee  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.

Government Operations committee  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.

Government Operations committee  Yes, I believe we are. Right now I think the only one that is there is GeoNB. That is listed on the site. We actually have a lot of open data. It's just not organized into an open data site.

Government Operations committee  I think there were two questions, so I will answer the first one. Yes, we are bilingual, and the information that would be put out would satisfy the English and French requirements. When we publish information, we have to put it out in both languages. Second, I would refer you to the search engine Google.

Government Operations committee  Yes. Right now, all governments, whether at the federal, provincial or municipal levels, are adopting various taxonomy systems to categorize the services they offer. The categorization of data is completely different from one website to another. As a result, when people consult a site, they have to kind of figure out how the data and services are categorized.

Government Operations committee  Yes there could be some instances where we perhaps do some duplication of work. And I think there are a lot more opportunities to share information between the three levels of government, especially in geographic data. Like I mentioned the Government of New Brunswick shares data with Natural Resources Canada.

Government Operations committee  Currently we share information with a research data centre located at the University of New Brunswick to do any research related to health. Obviously it's not private information but more aggregate information. I think that's similar to other provinces. We are following on Manitoba or other provinces.

Government Operations committee  To make data open by default, we are setting up a new system. The information is organized so that it can be entered in databases whose basic criteria are compatible with international criteria allowing direct access to information. These days, we need to understand the complex systems in place before we can get to the information.