Planning Pool

Vancouver’s announcement earlier this summer that the city would open its data created quite a buzz on blogs and podcasts around the world.

Photo from Vancouver Transit Camp by Jason Vanderhill on Flickr

What is involved in opening a municipality’s data to the public? The motion passed by Vancouver city council this May includes three simple components:

Any data that the city collects, from current zoning applications to the library catalogue, should be made publicly accessible unless it impacts individual privacy.

While plenty of public documents and data have long been publicly available, open standards will improve its accessibility and usefulness.

City-made software will be licensed … Continue Reading

It’s likely that you’ve already heard about Wolfram Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that computes answers rather than searching for them, like Google or Yahoo. Invented by a physicist and arguably most useful for calculating science or math questions, Wolfram Alpha also works with demographic and geographical statistics, making it really fun to play with!

So you can get an idea of how useful Wolfram Alpha can be, here are some searches I did:

• A simple comparison of Vancouver and Toronto
• Life expectancy worldwide
• A comparison of some US cities
• Comparison of populations in two Arizona counties
• The comparison of unemployment rates in multiple cities
• State level household income
• Comparison of California’s population as a proportion of Canada’s population

Nevertheless, Wolfram Alpha cannot compute some data at the subnational … Continue Reading