Update: Toronto Data Sharing: The Rest of the Story

Update: What was the inspiration for opening up the data? A talk by the Mozilla Foundation Executive Director.

But the open data initiative was inspired by a keynote speech from Mozilla Foundation executive director Mark Surman at the City of Toronto's Web 2.0 Summit in the fall of last year, according to [Mayor David] Miller. "Openness and participation created a better Internet," stated one of Suman's slides. "They can also create a better city ... We can make a city that thinks like the Web. You just need to ask us for help."

- Computerworld

---- original post 11/5/09 -----

I saw on Twitter earlier this week that Toronto had made some of its data available for download. Torontoist attended the Toronto Innovation Showcase where the announcement was made. The report describes the data, its limitiaatons and focuses on the open data lab, where attendees "had the opportunity to talk with City experts about the data, and brainstorm ideas for new applications and mashups." Bottom line: the data release is just a stating point and the details for updates and future dataset releases are still up in the air.