Mr. Chair, committee members, I thank you for the opportunity to address the committee today.
This short presentation will cover three areas. First, I will briefly explain how Statistics Canada is adopting the principles of open data in our dissemination practices. Second, I will explain how our agency is contributing to the Government of Canada open data portal. Finally, I will explain our role as a service provider for data.gc.ca.
Clearly the concept of open data is a natural fit with our agency's mandate. Providing our data free of cost, free of barriers to redistribution, and the machine-readable formats allow us to make our output more accessible to data users. Over the years we have steadily moved to increase the amount of free statistical information found on the Statistics Canada website, which is our main dissemination vehicle. In February of 2012 our organization took an important step by making all standard data on the web available free of charge. We also adopted an open licence framework and eliminated all royalty fees, even for custom data tabulations.
Since then visits to the Statistics Canada website have increased by over 20% and web traffic to the CANSIM application, which is our main output database of socio-economic data, has doubled for that application.
I will now move on to talk about our contribution to the Government of Canada open data portal. It is our approach that all standard aggregate downloadable data that are found on the Statistics Canada website should also be discoverable through data.gc.ca. To date, we have registered 5,400 data sets to the portal, which represents approximately 72% of the general non-geospatial data sets.
The data sources include census population, the national household survey, census of agriculture, output from our CANSIM database, our summary tables, industry and occupation classification files, and most of our geographic reference files. Monthly international trade data will become available to the open data portal in the next couple of months, and more classification files and geographic files will also be loaded over the course of the next year.
We do have evidence that data users are accessing our data sets via the open data portal. From the CANSIM database alone, we know that about 6,000 download requests were generated from data.gc.ca.
I know you've heard about the recent Canadian open data experience, hackathon or codefest, in which students, entrepreneurs and developers focused on building applications with data found on the open data portal. During this event our data sets were accessed approximately 1,500 times, which was more than any other federal department. Of the 15 finalists in this event, seven used data from Statistics Canada.
These are some examples that demonstrate to us that our data sets are, indeed, reaching a new audience through data.gc.ca.
The last slide explains the role of Statistics Canada as a service provider for the open data portal. In addition to our role as a main data contributor, you are aware that the second generation portal was launched last June, but you may not be aware that Statistics Canada plays a role behind the scenes for the portal's system development and technical support operations. This service delivery is governed by a memorandum of understanding with Treasury Board Secretariat, which is our client in this endeavour.
Mr. Chair, this concludes my remarks. I'd be happy to take any questions committee members may have when you get to that point.
Merci.