Edmonton Opens Up City Data

Edmonton Opens Up City Data

The City of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada is following suit of Vancouver and Toronto and opening up city (public) data.

Data available now (more available after review of the community preview Feb 2010).

• 2009 Census - Age and Gender
  

• 2009 Census - Dwelling Unit Ownership
  

• Bus Stops Edmonton Transit Locations

• City Council Meeting Schedule

• City Parks Locations of various City parks in Edmonton

• Community League Centres Locations in Edmonton

• Locations of all Fire stations in Edmonton

• Locations of historical buildings in Edmonton

• List of Planned Road Closures throughout the City of Edmonton

• Police Stations Locations in Edmonton

• Locations of School buildings in Edmonton
  

Though Edmonton take it a stage further and provide feeds and data overlay map ready so users can quickly make use of the data.


Default View of Bus Stops Overlay on the Edmonton City of Edmonton Website

Getting to the Data

This example show the direct feed http://datafeed.edmonton.ca/v1/coe/BusStops/ as a KML (Google Earth) file loaded directly on Google Maps.
To view this Data as above - http://maps.google.com/?q=http://datafeed.edmonton.ca/v1/coe/BusStops/?format=kml

There is a stage futher, not only do City of Edmonton provide Scripts ready made so it makes it much easier for non programmers to create their own web maps.

Default is Bing (Virtual Earth) Maps though drop-down Language Environment reveals Google Maps API source code.

This a mapperz example taken from the code above. Though there are two important changes for the examples to work.
1. jquery-1.3.1.min.js needs to be fully mapped to your server/website
2.Google Maps API requires a specific API Key for YOUR site (API Key signup)

Other changes mapperz made are simply moving the latitude and longitude to centre on Edmonton and not Washington DC.

Links - and Well done to the City of Edmonton making this available.
http://data.edmonton.ca/

mapperz version (tweaked to work)
http://mapperz.googlepages.com/edmonton_google_map_source.html
source:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Edmonton+releases+downloadable+databases/2438135/story.html