Toronto goes open… sort of
28 November 2009
Back on November 2nd, the City of Toronto launched their toronto.ca/open service – a project aimed to be the “official data set catalogue” of the city. Part of the OpenTO initiative to make various data that the city has collected available to developers in formats that make them easy to manipulate, toronto.ca/open is the first step to making the city and its services more “open and accessible”.
The hope is that if the city makes this information available in a readily-usable form, developers will take the time to create various services around them, helping citizens enjoy and take advantage of what Toronto has to offer. For example, data on garbage collection, public transit or upcoming city events could be used to create a service that would alert users through various means of communication. But at present, the amount and types of data available are fairly limited.