Description

Open Data: Team Assignment This project focuses on Canada’s Open Data initiative: http://open.canada.ca/en • The Open Data portal gives access to municipal, provincial and federal government data. Governments are not required to upload and share their data. 1) Explore the Open Data portal. Identify positives and negatives/gaps in the portal’s userfriendliness. Given the opportunity what changes, if any, would you recommend to the Treasury Board/federal government 2) Your team has been hired by a major U.S. retailer that is looking to enter Canada. Find raw data (i.e. not summary tables) that will assist your client in decision-making process (e.g. transit rider statistics, demographics). NOTE: Open Data does not have retail data. a. Do a keyword search for Median Income b. Then, scroll to find the following file: i. Census families by family type and family composition including before and after-tax median income of the family •

NOTE: Do not search by the aforementioned filename; if the professor had not provided the filename, you would not have known the filename c. Select the CSV English file. d. Open the file e. Then, save the file as an Excel workbook file f. What are the three levels of geography in the file? g. What does the variable DGUID tell us? 3) Look for other data across geographies (e.g. Sarnia ON, Charlottetown PEI). What conclusions can you draw? What challenges, if any, did you face in comparing by geography? NOTE: The professor is not looking for commentary that has been posted on the Internet; he wants your thoughts. 4) Based on your experience with Open Data, What would you recommend the Treasury Board/federal government to enhance the data (e.g. formats; data that is not currently available) 5) Compare Canada and EU’s Open Data http://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/ Deliverables • Written report: maximum of 5 pages of text