Information & Ethics committee  No, it's okay. I just want to make.... I feel it's very important that this committee has a very strong framework for understanding this problem.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, that's exactly it. This piece of paper is not a machine-readable document. And a PDF, which is very often the publication vehicle of choice for most governments, I would argue is not a machine-readable document. You open it in a machine, but very often you can't copy the te

Information & Ethics committee  I think the short of it is whether I can play with the data, because if I can't play with it, then it's not open.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Sometimes it's copyright, sometimes it's a licensing agreement. For example, this used to be true in Vancouver before we wrote the open motion. There was information that was shared on the city's website, so there was data that was available, but they actually had a disclaim

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. So copyright would be one form of restriction that might apply to a data set.

Information & Ethics committee  So spidered and indexed means the data can be found. Most of us now look for information by using a search engine on the Internet, whether that's Yahoo! or Google or Microsoft Bing. We use one of these to go and find information. There's a reason why those search engines know w

Information & Ethics committee  No. I don't think it's in the interest of this committee to get into the specifics of the file formats one should publish in, but I think there are a lot of good practices out there. For example, if you look at the City of Vancouver's open data portal, very frequently they will s

Information & Ethics committee  That's what makes the Americans so interesting. There's no licence, at least at the federal level, for that data. It is in the public domain.

Information & Ethics committee  That's correct.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely.

Information & Ethics committee  I've been working with them very closely. Come back to us in about two months and we'll have a different answer for you.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, but if you look at the types of recommendations that committee made--or that task force made--I think they are very applicable to the types of issues you were looking into. And I think there are a number of recommendations in there that you might look to as models.

Information & Ethics committee  The Americans have a wonderful system where all government information that is created is, by default, public domain. It has no licence. There are no restrictions, so you can use it to do anything you want. You can change it. You can build an entire business around it. You can tu

Information & Ethics committee  From the very beginning.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, and this is one of the reasons you need to look at this so closely. People will say that if we lift crown copyright, who knows what will happen? To our south, we've had a neighbour who's never had crown copyright, and they have done, I don't know, relatively well economicall