Open Data And Edmonton Public Schools

0 CommentsMonday • April 12, 2010 • by Paul Letourneau

Times are changing. Every day people are getting increasingly more involved in their communities. Here in Edmonton, there are many people and companies that are working together to improve the way that the cities data is used and distributed. As part of an initiative to improve the accessibility, transparency, and accountability of City government, the city of Edmonton Data Catalogue provides access to City managed data sets in machine-readable formats. Open Data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data are freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. This data can then be manipulated and used to develop things like maps, software applications and even iPhone apps among other things.

A great example of this would be the city of Edmonton’s initiative to launch an iPhone app competition. You can read more about this here.

Some already existing apps that have been developed through the ‘Open Data’ philosophy are:

• My Stops: the quickest and easiest way to check your most frequently-used bus and transit schedules on iPhone and iPod Touch.
• ETS Trip Planner: Provides trip planning with Google Maps online.
• Route 411: Provides trip planning with Google Maps for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

What does this have to do with Edmonton Public Schools? As part of the online communications team for EPSB, Jeremy and I have been following the Open Data movement here in the capital city. Not knowing exactly how to go about putting EPSB data together for the public, we asked Mack D. Male, a software developer here in Edmonton, to guide us through the process.

The following has been taken directly from Mack D. Male’s blog. You can find his blog and more posts about Edmonton, data and anything social media here.

Today I’m very excited to announce that Edmonton Public Schools has taken a big step into the world of open data by releasing a data set containing information on all of their schools, including the six opening later this year. I understand the data will be made available in the City of Edmonton’s Open Data Catalogue early next week, but you can download the CSV file today if you like.

Download the Edmonton Public Schools Data in CSV or grab it on the City of Edmonton Data Catalogue

Back in early February I met Jeremy and Paul for lunch to chat about open data and the community here in Edmonton. One of the things we talked about was how Edmonton Public Schools could get involved. In addition to attending events like the Open City Workshop, Jeremy and his team also started working behind-the-scenes to pull together data that might be useful to share. I helped define the fields that should be included and did the geocoding work, but they did all the rest. The result is a great data set of public schools in Edmonton, containing the name, address, lat/long, grade levels, programming information, and contact details for each.

Edmonton Public Schools follows in the footsteps of the Edmonton Public Library in embracing open data. Both organizations should be applauded for being “early adopters” and for their enthusiastic participation in the open data movement here in Edmonton. They have set an example that others can follow. Specifically:

• Start small! EPL released branch locations, EPSB released school locations.
• Work with the community! In both cases, I was able to help with some of the work. There are many others in the community who are eager to help as well.
• Engage the City! In addition to getting the data in the catalogue, which is really important to have a central repository, the City has also offered some suggestions for improvements.

Thank you to Jeremy and the rest of the team at Edmonton Public Schools for making this happen!

No post about a new data set would be complete without mentioning that the data is now available at ShareEdmonton! You can now see a list of all public schools and on the details page for each one, you can see the relevant school ward, grade level, and programming information on the right side (for example, McNally, the high school I attended). More improvements coming soon.

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