The Government of Canada produces and acquires data in areas such as health, environment, agriculture, and natural resources. The goal of the GC Open Data Portal is to create socio-economic opportunities and promote informed participation by the public by expanding access to federal government data.Open Data is a practice that makes machine-readable data freely available by way of portals, metadata, and search tools for reuse by governments, citizens, voluntary organizations, and the private sector in new and unanticipated ways.The GC Open Data Portal is a collaborative effort amongst Government of Canada departments and agencies to provide access to data managed by the government that can be leveraged by citizens, businesses, and communities for their own purposes. The government will work towards making public data that is not sensitive in nature (i.e. data which is NOT personal, secret, or confidential) broadly available in reusable formats. [Source: Website]

The Open Data Foundation is committed to using and contributing to international standards and is a project- and results-focussed organisation. We believe in using open standards to deliver measurable benefits in solving business problems in the collection, production, and dissemination of statistics. The aim is use and integrate these standards in a coherent and consistent way, to develop tools and techniques to make them easy to use, and thereby work towards a universal and harmonised statistical architecture. [Source: Website]

Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other “Open” movements such as open source, open content, and open access. The philosophy behind open data has been long established (for example in the Mertonian tradition of science), but the term “open data” itself is recent, gaining popularity with the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web and, especially, with the launch of open-data government initiatives such as Data.gov. [Source: Website]

A collection of slideshows introducing the concepts of Open Data as well as various associated branches.

The Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) is an initiative led by Microsoft Public Sector Developer Evangelism team. OGDI uses the Windows Azure Platform to make it easier to publish and use a wide variety of public data from government agencies. OGDI is also a free, open source ‘starter kit’ with code that can be used to publish data on the Internet in a Web-friendly format with easy-to-use, open API’s. OGDI-based web API’s can be accessed from a variety of client technologies such as Silverlight, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, mapping web sites, etc. [Source: Website]