Government Operations committee  I'm certainly delighted whenever the federal government can take the lead on a complicated policy issue. Certainly at the provincial level, we're struggling with this. I think it has been one of the challenges around implementing open data within our organization. There's a view

Government Operations committee  I certainly think the strength of the open data conversation has been the emphasis on getting us moving on publishing data. I think the weakness has been that it has seemed to focus us on a lot of technical issues—data licensing, data standards, and those kinds of elements. The

Government Operations committee  It has a number of different mechanisms at its disposal. One area is academic funding; that could be a focus. Training initiatives through Employment and Skills Development Canada offer another. There are also the labour market agreements with the provinces, other relationships w

Government Operations committee  I can tell you that one of the strongest user bases for our dataset, DataBC, is the post-secondary sector. And while our analytics don't tell us exactly who's using the set, whether they're a student, teacher, instructor, professor, or researcher, it's clear that UBC is a big use

Government Operations committee  Certainly the universities are doing a lot in terms of online education. Royal Roads University in Victoria does this as part of its core business. Also, in the public education system, online courses are available for students in the more senior years, in the high school years.

Government Operations committee  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.

Government Operations committee  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 ong

Government Operations committee  It's pretty much run on cost recovery.

Government Operations committee  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.... He

Government Operations committee  Yes, it is.

Government Operations committee  We do value-added types of products all the time. That geocoder I mentioned earlier is a good example of that. There are a whole bunch of address data that are collected and shared by municipalities. What we're attempting to do is bring the address data together so that you can u

Government Operations committee  I want to make sure I understand. Are you thinking we should be selling ads on our DataBC site? I don't think I quite get the question.

Government Operations committee  Oh, no, we're not doing that.

Government Operations committee  No intention of selling advertising on the government website.

Government Operations committee  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