Another approach to open municipal data

Nanaimo BC is an early adopter in the growing municipal open data movement. Beautiful Nanaimo is the second largest city on Vancouver Island, which should be built on delicious layers of crumb, icing and chocolate but which is instead sedimentary and volcanic rock. Between publishing open data and the bathtub races, there is a lot to love about Nanaimo, BC.

Nanaimo Open Data highlights

The Nanaimo open data catalogue acknowledges the lead of initiatives like the Washington DC open data catalog. The good influence of the DC open data project shows in the well-organized table of data sets, presented in accessible formats. As with DC, feeds are provided for data updates. Fantastic. As with all municipal open data projects, that Nanaimo is publishing open data is important and positive.

• Nanaimo BC open data catalogue
• Possible, and unconfirmed open data license for Nanaimo open data catalogue

Issues with using Nanaimo open data

I had trouble finding the license for the Nanaimo open data catalogue^[1]. The link above, might be the data license, or maybe not. It is a disclaimer relating to data but it is in the engineering section of the web site away from the open data. This is frustrating. Not everybody will look for the license. Not everybody will follow a license. A concerned potential user should be able to find the license. The legal disclaimer link on the data catalog page is the general web site disclaimer and makes no mention of data or data terms and conditions.

The Washington DC open data catalog has a small text link to their terms on the catalog page but even that was a little less obvious than I might have hoped.

The pick of the crop so far, in license visibility, is the layout used by Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver, each with a prominent license sidebar and multiple links to the terms of use. This is very helpful to those concerned with the license of the data.

So if the engineering disclaimer is the license for the Nanaimo open data, it has some good points and bad. The nice thing is that it is short and doesn't exclude types of use, it merely disclaims liability for Nanaimo. Fair enough. Unfortunately, it doesn't say what rights the data user is granted. In the absence of a specific grant of rights, I'd expect to be limited to fair use / fair dealing rights, like criticism or review, news reporting, research or private study. I certainly would expect to be allowed to modify and redistribute the data, and those are exactly the things that I would want to do to create an interesting data visualization.

The Cake Test

Sadly, with no rights granted, this possible license fails the Cake Test, as the DC license does.

License versions?

Another drawback of the possible Nanaimo data license is that there is no obvious version number, or feed / mailing list to be informed if the license changes.

Suggestions for the Nanaimo open data catalogue

• Make your selected license for the Nanaimo open data catalogue obvious.
• Use the Public Domain Declaration and License (PDDL) from the Open Data Commons at the Open Knowledge Foundation as your license to make your data compatible with the broadest selection of data communities.
• Be sure to make the version number of your selected license obvious and provide a method to keep tabs on updates.
• Keep publishing open data and updates!

Related articles

Consider reading this detailed review of the weaknesses in the early version of the open data license used in Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver.

References

[1] When I visited the site on 14 Mar 2010 I searched for data, license and terms but did not find a data license.

Credits

Alessandro Volta photo © 2009 CCBY R.Weait.
Nanaimo bar photo CCBY Stephanie Spencer on wikimedia commons