That's an interesting question.
In the past we'd have people come to us and say, “I've looked at the community accounts, and you have your table, so you must have an awful lot more data to have created those” and our answer was yes. If somebody wanted that and they asked for it, we would deal with the privacy and confidentiality issues and we would provide it to them on request.
What's changed is that with open data there is essentially a focus now on the more elemental forms of the data that before, for example, we might have put in a table form, or for that matter, the data could be in a lot of government administrative databases and that sort of thing. From our perspective, the big change now with open data is that governments have embraced the idea of providing that additional elemental form. In the past, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of what we provided had value added to make it easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to access.
With regard to business development and that sort of thing in particular—because I think that's probably where a lot of the action is going to be in terms of open data in our province, and I suspect, in lots of others—what we plan to do, as we consult, is to see what businesses think they need and what would be useful. That, in combination with our own thinking in terms of the data sets we may have in government that we can bring forward and that will be useful to people for that particular purpose, presents an opportunity now, with the open data commitment by government, to actually begin moving some of that data out there.
One point I haven't heard anybody mention here this morning, which I would like to just toss out there, is that if you really think of what a best practice would be in terms of a good, solid organization providing open data, one of the things would be rejigging how that organization does its business and builds its databases and sets up its databases, and so on and so forth, so that it gets the data out there efficiently and effectively.
For example, you would build your administrative databases in that manner, change your organizational process so that you could actually get access to those data efficiently, and then do at least the minimum that is adequate to make sure that raw data, when it's out there, even though it's raw, is still good quality. That's one thing I haven't heard anybody mention. I haven't heard that mentioned pretty much anywhere.
I don't know if you have, sir, but it really is something that needs to be thought of, because the resources required to provide open data are huge. Right now I would argue that the resources required to do it today are probably 50 times what they should be, just because you have the administrative databases that are just not designed to provide that kind of data.