SURREY — The City of Surrey is set to launch its open data initiative later this year and with more than 300 sets of information, it's said it will be largest municipal catalogue in Canada.
From online crime reporting to council expenses to statistics on water levels, the type of information will widely vary.
Coun. Bruce Hayne, chair of the investment and innovation committee, said the data sets will be generated from virtually every city department, from parks and rec to finance to police and fire.
"We want to make that data open and available to the public," Hayne said, noting there are many benefits associated with doing so.
"A lot of that comes from app development. As soon as you start to make these data sets available in a public domain you find the private sector is very good at creating apps and using that data to create benefits for the public," he said, adding an example of said use could be crime apps.
"When the police are analyzing crime statistics and so on, they want to bring that forward and make it publicly available, so people can see where certain hot spots are, and what the police are doing about those hot spots, whether it be property crimes or other things. It helps with the transparency and openness of data," he noted.
Different data sets will be updated in different time increments. Council expenses will go up quarterly, Hayne noted, but said when it comes to crime stats, "quarterly or even monthly would be more important so you can get a sense of those trends and look at things in much more real time."
The data will not simply be posted online in a PDF format, but rather in such a way that people - app developers or anyone else - can download the information and look at it in a variety of ways.
Hayne said the city will begin to launch the sets this year.
Angela Robert is co-founder of Conquer Mobile, a company specializing in mobile app development. She welcomes the city's move toward open data.
When it comes to app development, she says the data can be used to provide tools to businesses or residents.
The Walk Score App is an example.
"So when you find an apartment anywhere, when you're looking to purchase that, as an added value, there's a walk score. So you see that you can walk to all these different types of amenities or hey, you're in Timbuktu," she said.
Robert said when cities have open data, there are also benefits from an economic development perspective.
"What it allows a company or enterprises to do is when they're choosing locations for the latest target or new industrial locations for large companies, having access to that data really enables those companies to choose the most optimum location and it actually speeds up the time for them to make decisions on bringing new businesses to Surrey."
Starbucks needs to ensure they're on a corner with a certain level of foot traffic. A big industrial site may require a certain amount of power. A big computer company might need a lot of bandwidth.
Robert said having that information readily available - versus having to hunt it down or not being able to find it at all - will speed up economic development coming into the city.
The open data initiative is just one part of the Smart Surrey Strategy, as outlined in a report to council on July 7.