Civic Data
= The Open Government Data movement strives for Open Access to Civic Data
Description
""Civic data are a public good, and more specifically, are "numerical quantities or other factual attributes generated by scientists, derived during the research process through observations, experiments, calculations and analysis". It is also "facts, ideas, or discrete pieces of information, especially when in the form originally collected and unanalyzed", and also, from the Report of the National Science Board, "numbers, images, video or audio streams, software and software versioning information, algorithms, equations, animations, or models/simulations". Distinctions are made between raw or level 0 data and derived, refined, synthesized or processed data. Raw data are normally unprocessed; examples include digital signals from a sensor or an instrument (e.g. unprocessed satellite image, thermometer), facts derived from a sample collected for an experiment (e.g. blood sample, ice core), and facts collected by human observation (e.g. mine tailings, census). Computations and data manipulations are related to research objectives and methodologies. Refined or processed data are raw data that have been manipulated, undergone computational modeling, been filtered through an algorithm, sorted into a table or rendered into a map. In these cases, access to the models is as important as access to the output results of those data.
In other words, civic data are the data created and maintained by public organizations and paid for by the public purse as part of the ongoing day-to-day activities of governing. Public data can include crime data at the neighbourhood scale, the number of traffic violations for certain streets, election results, census data, road networks, non-private health data, government expenditure data, school board catchment area boundaries, aggregated test results, environmentally sensitive or contaminated areas, or basic framework map data that include census areas, administrative boundaries, postal code areas and geo-referenced satellite images. Framework data are particularly important as these are the foundational data sets upon which other datasets can be organized. Civic data also includes those created as part of government funded research organizations such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) or any other outsourced publicly funded data and information creation activity." (http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/514/473)