The Big Picture: What is new in the Data World

Data innovations happen daily: the semantic web, the cloud, visualization, mapping, sensors, spatial data infrastructures, etc. This portion of the Training Day will focus on recent access to public data initiatives in Canada with an emphasis on open government and open data. In this session participants will be introduced to data and participatory democracy, open data definitions and examples of good government policy. In addition, we will look at what some community groups are doing, the leadership in Canada’s big cities and the Province of BC by administrations and citizens. This will include licenses, open data initiatives, hackfests, hackathons, applications, challenges and opportunities. It is hoped that this overview will provide participants with insight about what is new in the Canadian access to public data world.