Governments stingy with raw data

Governments are suspicious of raw data requests, Jim Rankin of the Star, said Monday.

It is one thing to request a document from public departments and agencies by way of Canada's freedom of information (FOI) laws, but the uses of electronic data are ambiguous and potentially volatile, as far as governments are concerned, said Rankin.

Governments in Canada don't believe data should be disseminated or analyzed, Rankin continued, a practice common in the United States of America where statistics are analyzed to identify trends and to determine the success of social projects.

Obliged by the federal and provincial Access to information Act (ATI) bureaucrats acquiesce to FOI requests of raw data only to create difficulties for inquirers by supplying time-consuming hard-copies or PDF files rather than electronic files easily transferabel to data input programs, said Rankin.

To avoid the difficulties of FOI requests, seven-year waits, Rankin and his co-worker, Andy Bailey, have begun to "scrape" institutional websites for information. The sites allow single question queries into their databases, Rankin said. To speed-up the process, Bailey creates a "bot" to systematically siphon through the entire database in the span of a night, said Rankin.