Monday, February 29, 2016

Open Access Data

Question

I've been asked to identify open access data related to the prairie provinces to be used by groups who will be participating in a digital humanities hackathon. I don't know where to start. I think more is needed than population and education numbers, which were two variables suggested to me.

Answer

Statistics Canada Data:

For a hackathon, it might be good to provide a link to Stat Can's summary tables because they give an indication about what kind of data might be available for a given level of geography and they usually link back to CANSIM tables. Sometimes it's good to provide a smaller list of varied data as a jumping point.

Here are the tables by province, and the tables by metropolitan area.

GIS and Other open data:

http://download.geofabrik.de/north-america/canada.html

There is some data available under the open government license:
http://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset

There are some demographic data sets if that’s what you’re looking for:

http://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset?q=demography&sort=metadata_modified+desc


Alberta

Geology – GIS – Alberta Geological Survey (http://www.ags.gov.ab.ca/gis/download_gis.htm)

Misc. Data – Various – Alberta Government (https://geodiscover.alberta.ca/geoportal/catalog/main/home.page#)

City of Banff – GIS and Data (http://www.banffopendata.ca/)

City of Calgary – GIS and Data (https://data.calgary.ca/OpenData/Pages/DatasetListingAlphabetical.aspx)

Calgary Region – GIS, Data, and Imagery (https://opener.dobt.co/calgary-regional-partnership/browse/2939)

Grande Prairie – GIS and Data (http://www.countygp.ab.ca/EN/main/community/maps-gis/open-data/data.html)

City of Edmonton – GIS and Data (https://data.edmonton.ca/)

City of Medicine Hat – Data and KML (http://data.medicinehat.ca/)

City of Red Deer – GIS and Data (http://data.reddeer.ca/)

Misc.– GIS and Data – Open Alberta (http://open.alberta.ca/)



Manitoba

Misc. – GIS – Government of Manitoba (http://mli2.gov.mb.ca/land_projects/index.html)

City of Winnipeg – GIS and Data (https://data.winnipeg.ca/)

Geology – GIS and Data – Manitoba Dept. of Mineral Resources (http://www.manitoba.ca/iem/geo/gis/index.html)



Saskatchewan

Misc. Data – GIS and Data (http://opendatask.ca/data/)

City of Regina – GIS and Data (http://open.regina.ca/)



Canada

Water Data – Table of Data – Environment Canada (http://wateroffice.ec.gc.ca/search/search_e.html?sType=stat) +

Bathymetry – GIS and Images – Canadian Hydrographic Service (http://www.chs-shc.gc.ca/data-gestion/bathy/bathymetri-eng.asp)

Soils Data – GIS – Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (http://sis.agr.gc.ca/cansis/nsdb/index.html)

Pollution – Data and KMZ – Environment Canada (http://www.ec.gc.ca/inrp-npri/)

Wind – GIS – Canadian Wind Energy Wind Atlas (http://www.windatlas.ca/en/download.php)

Misc. “Basemap” info (Roads, landcover, names, administrative boundaries, imagery) – Geobase (now closed but data still remains accessible) (http://www.geobase.ca/)

Misc. Data – GIS and Map data - Natural Resources Canada – (https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/earth-sciences/geography/topographic-information/free-data-geogratis/11042)

Census Boundaries – GIS – Statistics Canada (http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/geo/bound-limit/bound-limit-eng.cfm)



There’s quite a few open GIS and data files at these links:

http://libguides.ucalgary.ca/c.php?g=255401&p=3048976



Also, there might be something of interest in GeoGratis (http://geogratis.gc.ca/geogratis/en/search).



Don’t forget non-Canadian sources. NASA has quite a few data sets which may be useful in a humanities context:

http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

Returning back to Canada . . . Environment Canada has historical climate data:

http://climate.weather.gc.ca/

The Bank of Canada also has some statistics by province:
http://www.bankofcanada.ca/publications/bfs/
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