The Yukon Government Launches Open Data Portal

Wednesday, 26 June 2019 15:33

Mark Burns, director of E-services for citizens, shows the 18 data set categories.

Open data is data that is available to everyone copyright free.

The Yukon Government launched its first ever open data portal on June 25th, 2019.

Open data is data that is available to everyone copyright free. Open data can be used commercially or for any other lawful purpose. This site contains data on subjects including science, health, climate, law, and more.

Mark Burns, director of E-services for citizens, says open data is important for maintaining transparency, "In order for democracy to work, in order for good government to work, it's important for people to have information about what's going on with their government. Open data is a bunch of data free of the narrative. It is the raw material that people can use to make up their own minds, to form their own opinions, do their own analysis, and understand what's going on with the government"

Burns assures that no personal information will be available nor any information that could be harmful, such as identifying medical or legal documents.

Minister of Highways and public works Richard Mostyn says the new open data portal will make finding data easier, and more accessible, "This service will promote innovation. It's a service that will promote education. It's a service that will promote new businesses, and through that, economic development. It will cut red tape, making it easier for Yukon citizens to learn things about their government. It is a service that will allow them to gain a deeper understanding about their community, their territory, their environment, the territories climate, its history, and well, just about everything."

The ultimate goal, according to Mostyn, is to modernize the government, "I believe this is a huge step towards our goal of modernizing your government. Of hauling it from, what I call, a 19th century institution, into the 21st century."

The portal currently has only 1200 data sets, however Mostyn says it will only grow, "There's an awful-lot of information the government has at its disposal that is not currently available to the public that we will be making available over the coming months as this website gets more and more robust. We're just going to keep adding to it."

The site, which is available in both French and English, has 18 categories of data listed, however some are incomplete. For instance, the category 'arts, music, literature' has no data sets in it. Over 1000 or the 1200 available data sets are under the 'science and technology' category.