There are usually four things people ask me about: what about privacy, what about security, what about the money, and are people going to use the information against us? We have been charging for spatial data over the years. My perspective on it is that we are not in the business of making money on the sale of data. That's not our core business. The money has been collected through taxes or other funds to pay for the information. So over the last couple of years and going into next year, I'm actually removing the revenue from my budget on the sale of spatial data. We are not concerned about people making money on the use of our data. We call that economic development.
Even before we released our data--and Michael was sharing his story about Montreal, and I do everything I can to encourage them to release their transit data--we made our transit data available before our open data came along. It was in February of 2009. We did that because we were working with Google to put our transit data on Google for citizens. When we did that, we also released it on our website, and it's been updated every Thursday since February 18, 2009.
The neat thing that happened after we did that was that two local companies in Edmonton created applications. One, a small technology company, created an A-to-B routing map. Another, made up of three students from the University of Alberta in their second year, created an app to tell you when the next bus or LRT was coming. The really neat thing about that is that because the general transit data follows an international standard, those apps are actually being purchased around the world and used in other countries. For us, it's about economic development.