Vancouver residents will soon be able to access crime statistics, sustainability information, and more easily searchable city council details through the municipality’s open data website.

Shari Wallace, director of IT strategy, business relationships and projects, told city council today (February 15) that Vancouver residents will also be able to access 311 data and the 2011 municipal election voting results through the open data site.

City staff plan to incorporate these priority areas, which were identified through public feedback, to the open data site this year.

Wallace noted that while all of these information areas were previously available to the public, incorporating them to the open data site will make them easier for users to search and analyze information.

“The key thing is a lot of this information is available today, so you can go online today and find out about our budgets and those kinds of things, but the difference is if it’s in machine readable format, then people can do a lot more with that information, in terms of relating it to other data, how to they publish it, how do they present it,” Wallace told the Straight by phone.

For example, she noted that a machine readable format for city council information would allow users to quickly find out when and where a particular issue was raised before.

Wallace said there’s a lot of “due diligence” that needs to be done on incorporating these new data areas to the website, particularly around crime statistics, to ensure that no privacy laws are being contravened.

The city launched its first pilot open data website in September 2009, which made 75 datasets of info available which were already in the public domain but not in open formats or not readily available for download.

Wallace said the most popular areas of the site include things like sewers and water, school boundaries, parks and community information, property zoning, voting boundaries and garbage and recycling schedules.

The city is also working with other jurisdictions on the project, including Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton and Montreal.

“This is just going to continue to evolve, and where we’ll be in two or three years time might be a very different place than where we think we’ll be today,” said Wallace. “So we just really need to keep an eye on the trends and be willing to adapt.”

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