Government Operations committee  There is not one answer to that question. For a significantly large number of data sets, including the one that we're talking about, there is geo-specific information included into the data set, so that you are able to find which statistics are being applied to which particular area of Canada.

Government Operations committee  No, not yet for sure.

Government Operations committee  It hasn't happened yet, but I suppose it is possible. Our biggest wish is that the data made available by data.gc.ca will trigger new development external to government and that some of those tools, some of those new apps, will be useful to citizens. Most of the time, I think they'll want to distribute those themselves, but I certainly will be watching carefully, as we will be with the results of the CODE contest that just finished this week.

Government Operations committee  I should have shown this to you before, because there is a page that provides information on the current top 25 downloaded data sets. There's also information on how much traffic the site is getting on a month-to-month basis, the total number of departments that are contributing data sets, and how many data sets from each department, and so forth.

Government Operations committee  I'm going to start with the page that you can see up on the screen now. This is the home page for data.gc.ca. This is our one stop shop for all of the open data that the Government of Canada makes available at any time to citizens, researchers, voluntary organizations, the private sector, the media.

Government Operations committee  Further to Corinne's point, although metadata is very important to everybody who thinks that their goal is to provide metadata, especially from the public sector, many jurisdictions have developed their own approach to metadata. If you're a user of open data or a developer, chances are you're going to want to bring data in from more than one jurisdiction.

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. Let's imagine we have a data set that was just crime statistics. The metadata would provide us with information on who the provider of that data was, so which department; whether or not there was a specific program or service within the Government of Canada that this data was created to support; the date of release of that data; a description of the data so you wouldn't necessarily have to go into the data to find out exactly what it contained, which is important because some of the data sets are very, very large; and the frequency of the data, so how often it is published and renewed.

Government Operations committee  Metadata would be more of a set of descriptive tags to describe the data, but not the actual data. For example, it would more likely be a set of factors; so time, frequency, title, provider, not the actual data that was held within the data set itself. So it's where it comes from, who it comes from, but not necessarily what the information is.