City of Greater Sudbury Launches Open Data Portal

Jul 15, 2015

For Immediate Release                                                  
Wednesday, July 15, 2015

The City of Greater Sudbury is proud to announce the launch of its Open Data Portal which will provide residents access to Greater Sudbury’s municipal government data and information in an effort to foster a transparent and open government.  Open data is considered one of the four pillars of the open government model adopted by Greater Sudbury Council in March 2015: open data, open information, open dialogue and open doors.

Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.

"City Council is committed to open and transparent government," said Brian Bigger, Mayor of the City of Greater Sudbury. "By providing municipal datasets to the public, we want citizens to have a greater understanding of the city and empower them to use the data to lead, innovate and ultimately create better systems and procedures that will improve service and save money."

The Open Data Portal will launch with 20 datasets, which is a collection of information gathered and compiled into one document. They are as follows:

1.    2014 Municipal Election Results
2.    Accessible Parks in Greater Sudbury
3.    Best Start Hubs
4.    Budget Vote 2015 (Councillor votes, item scores and impact to levy)
5.    Cemeteries in Greater Sudbury
6.    City of Greater Sudbury Job Postings (RSS)
7.    Communities in Greater Sudbury
8.    Council - City and Wards
9.    EarthCare Sudbury's Food Access Map
10.    Licenced Child Care Locations in Greater Sudbury
11.    MyBus API (real-time Transit information)
12.    Parks in Greater Sudbury
13.    Recreation in Greater Sudbury (arenas, baseball diamonds, beaches, boat launches, museums, etc)
14.    Routes in Greater Sudbury (bike routes and trails)
15.    Status of Current Freedom of Information Requests (updated weekly)
16.    Temporary Zoning in Greater Sudbury
17.    Townships of Greater Sudbury
18.    Transit Bus Stops
19.    Transit GTFS (standard format for developers)
20.    Zoning in Greater Sudbury

“We are encouraging the community to really get involved in this movement,” Caroline Hallsworth, Executive Director of Administrative Services for the City of Greater Sudbury said. “We will be showcasing citizen projects by creating a web page that lists apps created with the use of City datasets. We hope this will encourage others to get creative and design projects such as mobile apps or other information-based pieces. As we grow our dataset collection, we hope users will continue to engage with their municipal government.”

The Open Data Portal can be found at opendata.greatersudbury.ca. All City of Greater Sudbury open data can be viewed or downloaded for free. The Portal was created with ArcGIS Online, which allows citizens to search for data, view it in the browser, interact with it and download it in several formats including spreadsheet (CSV), map file (shapefile or KML), or via API access. The City of Greater Sudbury will release more datasets as they become available.

- 30 -