Government Operations committee  About your first point, the RDF format, I want to mention that it is still in development. It allows networking of data sets between various portals. It requires a lot of work. Within our open data initiative in Canada, we work with provinces and municipalities to allow for a joi

Government Operations committee  The data is accessible, but the RDF format allows automatic pairing, which requires a lot of classification. We have to make sure to do the right pairing between data sets from various jurisdictions, and avoid mixing data in a way that would not respect the data's integrity or ac

Government Operations committee  We'll certainly look into that site and compare. I believe there have been times when some of the data sets posted were in the wrong format. I would say that those are very few cases, as we work very hard with departments to ensure that they're in readable formats and properly de

Government Operations committee  Fundamentally, data is collected, aggregated, created by individual programs across government in every department. Larger departments have multiple data sets that they collect and work with as evidenced by the amount we have. We don't yet have an inventory of all the available o

Government Operations committee  What we have to recall is that open data, data.gc.ca, is a movement that is basically only three years old, with our formal joining of the Open Government Partnership in 2012. We are still, throughout the federal public service and even in the provinces, territories, and municipa

Government Operations committee  We're very preoccupied with maintaining the privacy of our users, so we do not track who comes and downloads; it is anonymous. We get occasional feedback on the site that says, “I'm interested in this data set. Can I have it?” We have their e-mail addresses for the purpose of res

Government Operations committee  We realize that the departments sometimes face a sudden increase in the number of access to information requests, while the size of the team in charge of processing the requests does not necessarily increase accordingly. There is a fairly set number of people on the team in charg

Government Operations committee  First of all, the government directory with names, titles, and telephone numbers is not personal; it is available online.

Government Operations committee  Last year we used various means to solicit feedback on the site from Canadians. They were invited to participate in online consultations and were asked questions over a certain period of time. We asked them to answer by submitting their comments and their questions. As well, the

Government Operations committee  We don't have direct proof, but we do have, if you will, indirect confirmation. There was a report by one institute yesterday about the apps economy and certainly in the U.S. and in the U.K. there are multiple media references to this. We're not tracking the economic result of o

Government Operations committee  We don't really measure it that way, because it's not a specific program. It's not an official program. What we have is a Treasury Board cost, which I would say has been, in this fiscal year, less than $1.5 million to cover employees and the other expenses we have. We foresee pro

Government Operations committee  —and search engines, but certainly we're not aware of an advertising budget.

Government Operations committee  Well, the reality is that it's a very small budget and a very efficient operation, but I'll explain why. Open data and our open government work is really about leveraging the assets and the work of all government departments and agencies. For instance, Environment Canada has be

Government Operations committee  To my knowledge, we have not had any advertising. We promote it online. We promote it through consultations—

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. With that we'll go on to the last part of the presentation. We'll jump to page 18 to just give you a wrap-up of the specific initiatives we're working on with our federal government colleagues. There are three important international initiatives. We've tal