All of the data on our portal is available free of charge, and that certainly is an important part of the open data construct internationally and certainly one that we support. So if our data is available, we make it available. Now of course not all of our data is available all at once simply because there is a lot of work by departments on preparing the metadata and preparing these data sets in the format that makes them reusable and easy to understand, compatible with the search tool on the portal, and so on.
So departments are going at it steadily. In fact, in preparation for the Canadian open data experience appathon, departments really came together and made a great effort at preparing, under a very short timeframe, a lot of high value data sets that had been requested by users of the portal. They went ahead and did the metadata and prepared them in the right formats and they were available to the appathon developers. So free is definitely an issue; it's definitely part of the construct.
The next point you question is about privacy, and it's important to note that the open data portal does not present information that is personal in any way. There is no personal information. This is information that is completely impersonal, so to speak, and generally speaking is about topics, but it wouldn't tie a citizen's use to a particular topic or anything like that. We're very concerned of course with the protection of privacy across the government and we work very hard to ensure that our open data assets respect that commitment to the protection of personal information.
The last point that you raised—and I may not have gotten all of your questions—is that what is also important about open data is that, from a federal sense, we have a lot of very valuable data assets, but our assets grow in value when they are combined with data assets at the provincial and potentially at the municipal level. So the federal government only collects data in the realms of jurisdiction that we have programs and services in, and the provinces of course have their own programs and services. They collect information of a slighty different nature. To open data enthusiasts, the greatest value is when they can mash up data that is free and that is under a common licence from all levels of government, and potentially one day internationally as the result of our work on the G8 charter.