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(Français) Communautique publie un manifeste pour un plan numérique québécois
MontréalOuvert publie un mémoire pour la commission des services aux citoyens
Nous avions déjà bloggé au sujet de la commission sur les services aux citoyens organisée par la ville de Montréal, dont la prochaine séance se tient demain à la Bibliothèque de Saint-Léonard.
Suite à notre présence lors de la première commission, nous avons publié un mémoire abordant les problèmatiques relatives à la communication entre la ville et les (jeunes) citoyens, et en présentant l’opportunité que représente l’ouverture des données publiques.
Ce mémoire vient tout juste d’être mis en ligne par la ville, vous pouvez d’ailleurs le télécharger directement ici (en PDF).
N’hésitez pas à faire des commentaires, et à suivre le dossier 🙂
Durant les trois semaines à venir, la ville de Montréal tiendra des séances publiques de la Commission du conseil municipal sur les services aux citoyens. La première séance de cette commission s’est tenue lundi dernier au CÉGEP du Vieux-Montréal, et presque toute l’équipe de Montréal-Ouvert était sur place.
Cette première session nous a permis de confirmer l’intérêt des montréalais, et notamment des jeunes montréalais, pour l’ouverture des données publiques. La communication entre la ville et les jeunes était un point central de la discussion, et il est ressorti de manière assez nette que l’accessibilité à l’information, qu’il s’agisse de nouvelles, de références, ou encore de données publique était un point clé, autant pour la ville que pour les jeunes citoyens.
Un autre point important qui est ressorti de cette première séance est la réceptivité des élus par rapport à l’ouverture des données : une fois que le concept des “données ouvertes” et présenté, il est plutôt bien accueilli et suscite l’intérêt. Cela dit, pour que cet intérêt se transforme en action, il est nécessaire de communiquer clairement que l’ouverture des données est quelque chose qui nous tient à coeur.
Pour ce faire, nous vous invitons à venir écouter, et surtout participer à l’une des prochaines séances de la commission, dont voici les dates et lieux :
- le mercredi 6 octobre 2010 au CEGEP André-Laurendeau (voir carte)
- le jeudi 14 octobre 2010 : Bibliothèque de Saint-Léonard (voir carte< http://ur1.ca/1xpgr>)
- le mercredi, 20 octobre 2010 : le 6767, Centre communautaire, Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges (voir carte)
Alors si vous voulez que la ville ouvre ses données, il suffit de vous faire entendre !
Last week, a new webservice for Montrealers using city information was launched. The developer, Kent Mewhort, got in touch with us and we were able to get him to tell us a bit about his new site.
What is Déchets Montréal?
Earlier this week, I launched “www.dechetsmontreal.ca” DéchetsMontreal, a website to provide Montrealers with trash and recycling schedules that are importable into existing calendars (such as iCalendar or Google Calendar). My aim is to make the task of remembering to take out the trash just a little bit easier, and also serve as an example of how value can, with relative ease, be added to city data when it is made freely available.
What was the development process like?
The development process for this website was, on the whole, quite
painless. I was able to take advantage of some great open source software and openly-accessible APIs. To locate street addresses within the city, I simply make remote calls to Google’s Geocoder API. The website interface sits on top of Drupal and an open-source Drupal plugin, Calendar. With a bit of tweaking, I was easily able to get this module both displaying trash schedules and providing output in the iCal format (which is compatible with most calendar software).
In terms of the format of the data, what could the city improve to encourage more applications like yours?
It’s great that the city makes data for these trash and recycling schedules available on-line. It’s an excellent start. However, I’d like to highlight the importance of open, machine-readable data formats. By far, the most tedious part of developing DéchetsMontreal was writing the code to scrape the city schedule information into a suitable format. For most neighbourhoods, a garbage collection schedule on the city website looks something like the following.
Collection of household waste
Collection takes place on TUESDAYS and FRIDAYS. Leave objects in designated area (street or back lane) between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on collection day.
The information for each type of collection — recycling, green waste, and large object collection — is on the same webpage. Thus, for each neighborhood, it is first necessary to identify and parse out the schedule for each type of collection. Then, custom code must parse this text to find the applicable days of the week. Additionally, while this works for most schedules, some collections specify dates rather than the repeating days of the week. It is necessary to also handle this alternative format.
What happens if the information is updated?
Problematically, aside from these implementation intricacies, the text-based schedule format on the city website poses other limitations. I cache all of the schedule the data to limit the load on the city server, but there is no way to determine when the data is updated. I must regularly re-retrieve and reparse the information. Moreover, speaking of server load, everybody loses out when developers have to resort to text scraping. It’s a resource-intensive process on my server, and it’s much more data to download from the city server.
Any other issues you see with the data?
The current format also poses obstacles for creating bilingual services. While I’ve tried to ensure that most of the site is bilingual, the schedule details are, as of yet, only available in English. To provide these details in both languages will require different implementations to scrape and parse the text in each language. On the other hand, if this data was made available through an open data portal and in a machine-readable format, the task would be much easier. Then, I could simply write text in English and French and plug-in the dates, times, and special instructions.
Any last comments on open-data and the city of Montreal?
I’m encouraged to see the City of Montreal increasingly posting data on-line… now we just need open formats and an open portal!
Is this an open-source project?
Yes, the complete source code is now available at http://github.com/kmewhort/DechetsMontreal.
Comments and suggestions are always welcome to mailto:kmewhort@gmail.com
The website for DéchetsMontreal is http://www.dechetsmontreal.ca
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This is exciting because despite the barriers that currently exist, developers are finding ways to add value to city data and to create services for their fellow citizens. Thanks, Kent, and we hope the city starts to make it easier for people like you to create these sort of applications in the future.
Mike and I (Sébastien) attended the “Mapping Environmental Issues in the City” workshop held at Concordia University this week, where an international group of cartographers, artists and researchers have gathered to work around a newly created database aggregating socioeconomic, health, soil toxicity and air quality data in Montréal.
This database, which is now available on the workshop website is actually a shining example of the process of taking existing data and aggregating it in a consistent database that can be accessed and manipulated by tools and custom programs.
During the process of creating this database from many already existing data sources (including statscan), the team faced issues of data accuracy, completeness, resolution and of course, quality — which are issues likely to be encountered when opening a dataset.
Sébastien Caquard, one of the originators of this database, related that they had problems getting the data they wanted, so they had to “scrape” the data from existing material, typically published maps and articles.
Here we have another illustration of the benefits of an open-data policy in public organizations: by commiting to publishing data in open, standardized formats, you lower the barriers to innovation and encourage the re-use of the data. As collecting the data can be a long and expensive process, why let the data rot in locked up computers ? Open the data and let it become the soil for new, innovative projects !
The conservative party of Canada has yet to adopt an open-data policy, but the British “equivalent” is at least talking the right talk. Agree or not with his policies, David Cameron, the new UK PM, gives a solid TED talk on open-data.
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