Want to know where wheelchair ramps or dedicated park benches are located in New Westminster? Interested in what type of calls New West firefighters get summoned to most often?
You’ll find this and more on the city’s new open data website, which offers 12 categories of data and more than 40 data sets for public viewing and downloading in various formats. A tree inventory, school walking routes, demographic profiles and workforce commuting profiles are all found on the site.
“Our new open data website reaffirms our commitment to enhancing open and transparent government,” said Mayor Jonathan Cote in a press release. “We want to provide the public with easy access to the information and tools they need in a simple and timely manner.”
The data sets provided on the website are currently being submitted by various city departments and include information such as demographic profiles, land use, locations of park benches, and electrical and zoning information. Public users can also view many of these data sets visually using the city’s GIS maps.
The City of New Westminster anticipates that the list of open data sets will continue to grow as departments add more pertinent data and information for public consumption. The open data license on the website allows users to access and the data, royalty-free, as long as the information is used for lawful purposes and people abide by the terms of use.
As senior governments are becoming more secretive about information, Coun. Patrick Johnstone said it’s good to know local governments are providing more information for people.
“As a guy who started off this journey as a civic blogger, I always found it difficult on our website to find information and dig for data,” he said. “Having something like this makes it a lot easier to access data. It makes us look more open.”
Coun. Jaimie McEvoy hopes the initiative will help reduce the number of freedom of information requests to the city and the work city staff has to do in order to answer those requests.
“I am hoping that people can really look at a high level of information and only that stuff that really needs to be restricted for legal or legislative reasons could not be available,” he said.
The open data website is found at opendata.newwestcity.ca.
