Sub-committee examines benefits of open data policy

"No formal declaration has been made and no policy has been set, but it appears [that Ottawa] is moving toward the "open data" idea....Such a policy would be centred on the philosophy that certain city-collected and managed data would be readily available to anyone, in a "machine-readable" format, without copyright restrictions, patents or other controls on its use....Other Canadian cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Edmonton, along with U.S. cities such as New York, Washington and San Francisco, have worked on open data ideas...."