Good morning and thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am Guylaine Montplaisir, the chief information officer for Health Canada.
It is a great privilege for me to be here today. I want to thank you for the opportunity to present the Health Canada approach and progress to date with open data.
I am pleased to report that Health Canada's open data efforts have led to the release of 71 data sets which are currently on data.gc.ca. This number fluctuates relatively dynamically as we clean the data sets submitted and add new ones.
Out of all government departments, Health Canada has the sixth highest number of data sets published on the open data portal. The majority of these data sets are related to drug products, natural health products, nutrient value of common foods, medical devices, adverse reactions and notices of compliance.
Health Canada is extremely pleased that some of our published data sets were used in the recent CODE event, the Canadian Open Data Experience appathon, and one of the applications that was placed among the finalists—it was called Munchables—was developed using Health Canada's data set on nutrient values and common foods. The application, if it were ever to be used, would actually enable Canadians to make better decisions about the food they eat and to make healthy food choices, which is one of our goals.
At the outset, Health Canada focused its efforts on publishing data sets that were already readily available on our other Health Canada sites. Our initial approach to identifying data sets for publication to the open data portal was to rely heavily on subject matter experts across our organization to come forward with data they wished to publish. Our approach evolved over time to the point that we're now actively seeking and soliciting data sets from the program areas, especially in high-value categories such as those that were identified in annex B of the G-8 Open Data Charter in June 2013.
We continue to reach out directly to program areas to identify additional data sets.
In summer 2013, Health Canada undertook the development of a vision document to guide future activities around open government, including open data. This effort intended to generate engagement and conversations about open government within the organization. This document outlines proposed approaches to finding data, such as soliciting input from stakeholders, evaluating web statistics to determine visits and searches of our Internet sites, and analysis of past access to information requests received. A full-year analysis of our web statistics placed the Canada Food Guide and the drug product database among the top searches.
Our vision clearly articulates Health Canada's commitment to open government. That means a commitment to foster greater health program transparency by the Government of Canada, the health regulator; provide Canadians with opportunities to participate in federal health policy development; steer innovation in health and life sciences; and ultimately encourage Canadians to make better informed decisions about their health.
The document also clearly enunciates a number of guiding principles, those most relevant to our open data agenda being openness, quality first, and stewardship.
On the openness front, we will strive to improve data and information sharing within and between organizations and cultivate a culture of “open by default” to dismantle silos and expand the data and information that is shared publicly.
On the quality first front, the data and other electronic information that we release to the Canadian public will be prioritized, easy to understand, and published in a convenient, machine-readable format that supports reuse. When we started publishing to the portal, when the first version of the portal was created, we were publishing in the format that the data existed in. Today, because we want to be open by default, we create the information in the format that is machine-readable. Today, 60% of our data is published in the format of CSV, comma-separated values.
On stewardship, the third principle, our plan will focus on building the long-term infrastructure and capacity to identify, manage, and make available the data that is solicited and captured by Health Canada on behalf of the Canadian public while fulfilling mandated responsibilities and activities.
In order to successfully implement the open government directive once it becomes effective this summer, Health Canada will establish a number of essential operational conditions, such as: putting in place an operational mechanism for the rigorous analysis of information and data that will respect to privacy, confidentiality, security and ownership before the data is placed in the public domain; maintaining an enterprise data set inventory, and we have already begun doing so; and establishing a process with the active participation of all program areas to help facilitate and prioritize their release. We will also recognize the need for sound identification and evaluation processes.
Going forward, Health Canada will continue to explore options to increase the availability of data on data.gc.ca. Work will be undertaken to facilitate the integration of Health Canada data with other sources such as energy projects data and weather data, which affect health.
This data will serve as the basis for applications that private industry can develop and make available to the public for use at home and on mobile devices. We will look to improve access to our data through the implementation of an application program interface for our more dynamic datasets, such as
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to ensure Canadians have access to our most current data on an ongoing basis.
We will also continue to provide timely responses to stakeholder feedback with regard to the open data sets Health Canada has posted to the open data portal.
We will continue to identify data themes or clusters and prioritize their release, as part of the forthcoming open government action plan 2.0. Identifying and prioritizing data themes and clusters for public release will be based on two main principles: relevance to the Health Canada mandate and strategic outcomes; and responsiveness to what Canadians want and need to know.
Accordingly, analysis of the program alignment architecture and the strategic outcomes, as outlined in the Health Canada report on plans and priorities, will be the basis for categorizing information and data content. Stakeholder information needs will continue to be informed by environmental intelligence gathered from ongoing business operations, including stakeholder feedback, web metrics analysis, social media monitoring, as well as information release and analysis from our key international counterparts.
Mr. Chair, that concludes my opening remarks.
I appreciate the opportunity to be before the committee and am ready to address any questions you may have.