2024 Canadian Open Data Awards Winners
2024 Jury Statement
The Open Data Awards were created to celebrate excellence in open data across Canada. The awards provide an opportunity for the community to recognize their peers’ contributions to the field. As a movement that is constantly evolving, it’s also an opportunity to bring visibility to new ideas and encourage cross pollination, so that the open data community continues to advance and flourish as a whole. For the many who work behind the scenes and advocate for more openness, transparency, inclusion and better services for all people in Canada, we salute you. On behalf of the jury, we look forward to celebrating you, open data stars, in 2025.
We thank Reena Shaw, Edouard Clement, Diane Srivastava and Naz Ali for their invaluable contributions as the jurists of this edition of the Awards!
2024 Canadian Open Data Awards Winners
Open Data Accessibility Award: City of Hamilton
City of Hamilton
• The City of Hamilton’s Open Data Portal provides an intuitive and inclusive platform for residents to explore, visualize, and download city data.
• Key features such as interactive dashboards, mapping tools, and data stories ensure accessibility for diverse user groups, regardless of technical expertise.
• The portal offers insights into vital topics, including housing, transportation, public health, and economic development, with datasets like Ward Profiles enabling granular, localized analysis.
• They have also integrated open data into broader smart city initiatives, including public Wi-Fi maps and mobility data.
• Additionally, tools like the Housing and Homelessness Dashboard help policymakers track housing trends and measure program outcomes. Their Vision Zero Dashboard provides critical data to promote safer streets.
• By supporting multilingual functionality and mobile compatibility, the City of Hamilton has removed barriers to accessing public data and fostered informed civic engagement.
Open Data for Democracy Award: City of Victoria’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
The City of Victoria’s Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion created an ‘Equity Community Profile’. It is a collection of data layers on equity, demographics, access, income, housing, transportation and community well-being.
• Their accessibility analysis has integrated open data’s city assets, such as sidewalks and curb cuts, to model access through a pedestrian network reflective of accessible universal design standards.
• To align with the principle of ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’, advisory bodies such as the – Accessibility Advisory Committee, Youth Council, and Welcoming City and the People of African Descent Advisory Committees– ensure that the voices of all and every Victoria resident inform policies for equitable outcomes.
Open Data Equity Award: renovationwatch.ca
Renters in Toronto are facing a severe housing affordability crisis.
• Various strategies are used to push renters out of their homes in the pursuit of higher-paying tenants: strategies like
– Above-guideline-increases (AGI) on rent-controlled units: can lead to displacement when tenants can no longer afford rent.
– Renovictions: when a landlord evicts a tenant for renovations.
– Demovictions: when a tenant is evicted from their building so it can be demolished and redeveloped.
• Our winner aims to make building-permit and renovation-activity in multi-family dwellings more accessible to tenants and tenant organizers.
• Our winner’s website allows for:
– At-a-glance data on planned renovations, building and demolition activities in tenants’ buildings.
– Information on renovation and building work that may precede or follow eviction notices, and allow tenants to verify whether building permits have been filed.
– Mapping geographies of luxury upgrading.
Open Data Innovation Award: etick.ca
• Our winner is a public platform for image-based identification and population- monitoring of ticks in Canada.
• The emergence of Lyme disease and the rapid geographical range expansion of certain tick species in Canada are important issues for public health authorities and the public in general.
• Our winner created a portal that invites the public to participate in the monitoring of ticks in Canada, by submitting tick photos– for identification by a professional.
• These identification results, combined with other data such as collection date and locality can then be consulted and mapped so that all users may visualize the information related to any species, for any given year, or any geographical area.
• Access to their website is free and it is not necessary to contribute data, in order to consult the database.
Open Data Quality Award: COVID-19 data hub
• The COVID-19 data hub is an international collaborative initiative created by Emanuele Guidotti and David Ardia.
• It aims to provide the research community with a unified, fine-grained dataset of worldwide COVID-19 case data. By integrating epidemiological data with exogenous variables, it enhances the understanding of COVID-19 dynamics and supports informed decision-making.
• The project has received funding from esteemed institutions, including the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO) in Canada, the R Consortium, and the University of Lugano (USI).
• The platform is actively maintained, with continuous updates and enhancements driven by a global community of contributors.
• The project won the CovidR contest and was presented in a plenary session with over 800 participants at e-Rum2020, further highlighting its significant impact and recognition within the open data community.
• The unified dataset has been used by researchers worldwide, including the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.
• The project’s data has been pivotal in supporting informed decision-making during the pandemic; including 180 research papers on Google Scholar.
Open Data Rising Star Award: City of Toronto, Transportation Services, Data & Analytics Unit
In January 2025, our winner published four significant datasets, including two extensive traffic volume datasets:
• Intersection multi-modal volumes, a dataset from 1984 to present with daily refreshes that includes more than 30,000 individual studies, counting nearly 500 million motor vehicles, 4.5 million bicycles and 56 million pedestrians;
• Mid-block vehicle speed/volume/classification data, a dataset from 1993 to present with daily refreshes that includes one-day to one-week counts of motor vehicles and their travel speeds since 1993, with more than 1.2 billion vehicles counted in the dataset
These datasets are heavily relied-upon by the transportation industry to make engineering, planning and policy decisions.
• Prior to the release, if consultants, the public or researchers needed to access these data, they could only access by request, and pay for these reports.
• Our winner’s goal is to provide 100% of our data to the public, for free, and openly via the Open Data Portal and to shut down this paid channel.
Canadian Open Data Excellence Award: DataStream
• DataStream is a Canadian charity dedicated to advancing freshwater protection through open data flows. Its free open data platform has over 430 datasets containing more than 40 million data points.
• Their website is designed to be used by everyone, including those with disabilities, slow or limited internet access, and varying levels of technical literacy.
• Our winner collaborates with 300 water monitoring organizations, and with regional partners like the Government of the Northwest Territories, Atlantic Water Network, and Lake Winnipeg Foundation to meet the unique needs of local communities.
• Our winner respects Indigenous data sovereignty. Its Data Governance Policy is informed by the CARE principles for Indigenous data governance, and the First Nations principles of OCAP® (Ownership, Control, Access and Possession).
• All monitoring results shared on our winner’s portal are reported in a common format,based on the WQX standard for the Exchange of Water Quality Data, the most common global standard for water quality data.
• A usecase where our winner’s portal was used: in 2024, the St. Croix River Basin Network Analysis used DataStream to build a more strategic monitoring network in the St. Croix watershed.
• This was a collaborative effort involving Environment and Climate Change Canada, the United States Geological Survey, and the Canadian Rivers Institute.
Canadian Open Data Leader of the Year: Dr. Craig E. Jones
Dr.Craig Jones is the Associate Director HART project at the University of British Columbia– {the Housing Assessment Resource Tools (HART) project}.
• The HART tools, created by our winner and his team– are free, open-source, and public tools that remove barriers to access census data about housing. These tools allow everyone to view and understand their community housing needs.
• HART has mapped thousands of available public land parcels, incorporating proximity to key services and amenities with the Land Assessment Tool. This Land Assessment Tool has dramatically improved community access to available public land data, and has also informed federal policies like the Public Lands for Homes plan and the updated Federal Lands Initiative.
• The HART tools also specifically address the needs of equity-deserving groups, such as low-income households, marginalized populations, First Nations communities. This granular approach ensures that diverse populations are represented in housing assessments, and that policy decisions consider the unique challenges faced by vulnerable groups.
Media Contact
Paul Connor, Executive Director
Canadian Open Data Society
admin@opendatasociety.ca