[Open-data-census] Feedback on standards for City Census datasets

Mon Feb 17 17:46:09 UTC 2014

I've introduced some new categories:

- Public Works (public toilets, garbage, etc.)
- Public Safety (police, etc.)
- Health (hospitals, etc.)
- Permits (building, business, etc.)
- Education (schools, etc.)

Previously these were all lobbed into "Civic Information" which is a super category for any government information...

There is no doubt a good vocabulary that we can reuse but at least this is a first step.

James

On 2014-02-17, at 12:22 PM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:

> Now that I am reading James' list
> 
> Postal Code files, In Canada electoral districts are tied to the postal code, with your postal code you can find your voting station, who you MP, MPP and city councilor is and you can know in which electoral district you are in.
> 
> I agree that ESRI files should be considered suitable, especially since many enterprise GIS systems are in ESRI, or autodesk formats and it would be unrealistic to have them change thousands of legacy datasets from massive legacy and robust system.  Also, having wms and wfs files is also great as they can interoperate with other data distributed mapping systems.  Also, in Canada, the Geo folks were the first to share their data in a portal called GeoGratis and they were able to do it, as they provided the data in the format that were used in the producing institution and then they pointed to conversion services.  That ensured integrity of the originating dataset and enabled the 'sharer' to do so with the least amount of effort required, which meant, more sharing.
> 
> Cheers
> t
> 
> 
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 5:14 PM, James McKinney <james at opennorth.ca> wrote:
> A very simple dataset that very few governments publish is simply a spreadsheet listing all elected officials for that government, along with contact information. A few governments in Canada have been adopting common CSV headers for this dataset.
> 
> If the officials are elected by district/division, a geospatial dataset should be made available to describe the boundaries of the electoral districts. With respect to format, all governments I've been in touch with have geospatial datasets available as ESRI Shapefile. GeoJSON is great, but it is very easy to convert a shapefile, so I don't think the census should demand GeoJSON.
> 
> Also, if the officials are elected by district/division, a spreadsheet should be made available mapping each address in the government's territory to the district in which it belongs. In many cases, it is not possible to simply use a geocoder and a boundaries file to determine which district an addresses belongs to; for example, in the US, each floor of an apartment building may belong to a different district.
> 
> Another valuable dataset is a simple listing of each elected position within government (i.e. a description of the position itself, not the person who holds it).
> 
> With these datasets, it is possible to build a basic but fundamental service like https://developers.google.com/civic-information/ which allows citizens to look up representatives by address. I can provide example datasets for each of these.
> 
> James
> 
> On 2014-02-17, at 11:43 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:
> 
>> Greetings all;
>> 
>> I wonder if building inspections would be a good complement to building permits? That way data about building quatity and the quality of stock can be known.  Big issue in rental markets.
>> 
>> Also, Canadian cities and Dublin track data about Housing and homelessness, and I wonder if those would not be good socip-economic indicators.
>> 
>> a) stock of social housing in a city, and the count of those on social housing registry waiting lists
>> b) data about the homeless populations as per shelter counts in a city
>> c) data about foodbank usage
>> 
>> Cheers
>> t
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Christian Villum <christian.villum at okfn.org> wrote:
>> All,
>> 
>> We're putting together a list of standard datasets for the coming City-Census (as part of the Local Open Data Census)
>> 
>> https://docs.google.com/a/okfn.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqR8dXc6Ji4JdEEwSFF6OTJTMnhYa3h2ZS1temlDS3c&usp=drive_web#gid=0
>> 
>> Feedback appreciated!
>> 
>> -Christian
>> -- 
>> 
>> Christian Villum
>> International Community Manager
>> 
>> skype: christianvillum  |  @villum
>> The Open Knowledge Foundation
>> Empowering through Open Knowledge
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>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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>> 
>> -- 
>> Tracey P. Lauriault
>> http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/
>> https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
>> http://datalibre.ca/
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Tracey P. Lauriault
> http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/
> https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
> http://datalibre.ca/

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