Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify on this panel. I think it is a very important issue. I'll reiterate that. And I think you are going to be amazed at the kinds of things Canadians can do with your data. We have a lot of creativity out there in the community, and

Government Operations committee  In terms of privacy, I think it's important to note that privacy is not just about releasing individual data, releasing the name of somebody and their medical status. Aggregate data actually can also release personal information. It's important that statisticians and so forth are

Government Operations committee  That sounds good. I think open data is going to lead to an open government revolution. It has the potential of making governments more participatory, down to a much finer grain than we have right now. This is my call to ensure that, even at the beginning of the open data revol

Government Operations committee  I show my stripes as the bohemian academic here, but I don't think that the stick approach always works. As an academic, I'm required by my funding agencies to always provide any data that I come up with that's federally funded, and I have to make that available. There's a treme

Government Operations committee  Yes, and to follow up on that, I think it's a very needed initiative to create something like this in Canada. I have had students who have done start-ups in Toronto, and they eventually all go out to Silicon Valley because they eventually hit a wall and there's just not the cultu

Government Operations committee  It's the critical mass of expertise. So I think you need the significant investment of existing entrepreneurs. You need it on the business side, you need it on the technical side, you need it on the marketing side. You need a holistic approach to this; it's not just focused aroun

Government Operations committee  I think we shouldn't underestimate the difficulty in integrating datasets, and David alluded to it. The difficulty in taking two open datasets and aligning them, figuring out if two records actually refer to the same corporate entity—if the data that they represent is actually

Government Operations committee  Sure. I would take the example of Wikipedia. From a broad community with a broad set of expertise, you can come down to finding good, high-quality information. Is everything in Wikipedia true? Absolutely not. I think there are certain things you can use the power of the crowd

Government Operations committee  I'm responding to both questions too. I think we shouldn't worry that the government data is not necessarily what is returned in search engines and so forth. I think what we should do is understand to what extent government data has been taken up by researchers and by industry

Government Operations committee  Let me give you an example of where this has worked. In the U.S. They have a portal, I forget the exact name, but it's something like peer to patent database, where they have opened up the patent process to input from experts, recognizing that the expert on a particular patent to

Government Operations committee  I would like to thank the members of the committee for inviting me to participate on this important panel. I am a computer science researcher, and I study the problems and the opportunities that open data presents to the science of computers. In particular I study the problem of