Ottawa City Council voted last night to adopt the principle of "Open Data," making all city information that does not violate privacy laws public.
Ottawa joins Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto and other cities in adopting such a policy, putting the data online and allowing the public play with it and build their own applications around it.
Along with this decision, the city launched an open data catalogue with municipal information.
Currently the catalog is sparsely populated but more information should be added over time.
This is a huge victory for local application makers who in the past have had to either scrape data from municipal web sites or file Freedom of Information Access requests and wait in order to obtain the data.
Robert Janelle
Robert Janelle is a freelance technology journalist living in the National Capital Region. He's spent time covering the Ottawa start-up scene as a columnist and feature writer with his work in National Capital Scan, The Ottawa Citizen, The Ottawa Sun, Kingston Whig-Standard and The Escapist. He also suffers from a mild addiction to video games.
