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2025 Canadian Open Data Awards
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 2026!
We thank Awards Committee Chair Reena Shaw and the jury for their invaluable contributions to this edition of the Awards!
2025 Canadian Open Data Winners
Canadian Open Data Accessibility
RideTO
Accessibility isn't an afterthought in rideTO, it's foundational. The app achieves approximately 90% WCAG 2.2 AA compliance through deliberate design choices:
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Lexend typography, a font scientifically designed to improve reading for people with dyslexia
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Reduced motion support respecting both system preferences and manual overrides
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Full screen reader compatibility with ARIA live regions that announce alert changes dynamically
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High-contrast color system where every status color exceeds WCAG's 4.5:1 minimum contrast ratio
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Light, dark, and system theme modes adapting to user preferences
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Complete keyboard navigation with visible focus indicators and skip-to-content links
Beyond technical compliance, rideTO prioritizes information scannability: large ETA text at stops for quick glancing, color-coded subway status cards, filterable alert badges, and formatted scheduled maintenance, transforming walls of text into digestible, actionable information. (Click here to see their acceptance video!)
Canadian Open Data
for Equity
City of Windsor
The City of Windsor has moved beyond traditional data-hosting to provide a cohesive, fully integrated ecosystem.
This platform was designed with a user-first approach, ensuring a consistent and transparent environment to empower residents, developers, and policymakers through open data.
The City of Windsor provides this empowerment through geo-enabled datasets, robust API integration, and intuitive data visualization that transform raw data into community insights.
A “Developer Ready” infrastructure through the provision of a full RESTful API signals Windsor's commitment to the broader open data community. (Click here to see their acceptance video!)
Canadian Open Data Quality
City of Toronto’s Open Data Catalogue
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The City of Toronto’s open data team has demonstrated leadership by moving beyond data publication to embed data quality as a foundational element of its open data master plan.
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In the current data environment where access alone is often treated as success, Toronto has shown that high-quality data is essential for meaningful civic use and impact.
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Central to this leadership is Toronto’s Data Quality Score, communicated through Gold, Silver, and Bronze badges.
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The City of Toronto has made data-quality visible and understandable by using this framework to evaluate datasets based on characteristics that directly affect usability, including:
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Completeness, timeliness, metadata quality, documentation, and overall readiness for civic problem-solving.
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Canadian Open Data Excellence
City of Niagara Falls
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In 2014, the City of Niagara Falls began offering both tabular and spatial (GIS) datasets through the city's website, in limited formats (shape file and csv).
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In 2023, the city launched a new open data portal based on the ArcGIS Hub platform in ArcGIS Online.
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The city’s open data portal fully supports 29 out of 55 criteria specified in the WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility guidelines, partially supports 20 of 55, with 6 criteria not applicable. This represents an 89% full or partial compliance rate with the guidelines (see https://hub.arcgis.com/pages/a11y).
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The portal hosts 335 data sets, with over 9 million total hits on the ArcGIS services, and over 11,000 unique hub page views since inception.
Canadian Open Data
for Democracy
CRD Emergency Dashboard
The Capital Regional District’s Emergency Dashboard is a region-wide, public-facing hub that consolidates authoritative open data from local, provincial, and federal partners to provide one, trusted picture of risk—before, during, and after emergencies.
It maps current alerts and emerging threats (e.g., extreme weather, wildfires, air quality, tsunami/seismic events, road closures) and links residents to preparedness resources.
The Dashboard operationalizes open data by displaying machine-readable feeds from multiple sources (e.g., meteorological warnings, wildfire perimeters, AQHI, tsunami / earthquake notices, transportation disruptions) in a consistent, geospatial interface.
This reduces challenges to residents who would otherwise navigate multiple portals to understand regional risks. The interface support residents, media, NGOs, and volunteer response organizations, creating a single point of truth for “what’s happening now,” while enabling technical users to cross-reference source systems for deeper analysis. (Click here to see their acceptance video!)
Canadian Open Data Innovation
City of Hamilton
Historically, fire incident information in Hamilton had been shared through X (Twitter), which became unavailable during the cyberattack.
The City of Hamilton launched a new Hamilton Fire Department Incidents Dashboard, providing residents with timely information on active incidents that the Fire Department is responding to across the city.
The Dashboard provides critical information to residents while maintaining the necessary safeguards around privacy and security. It also aligns with the City's Digital Strategy to improve public access to information, streamline operations, and ensure data accuracy and privacy. (Click here to see their acceptance video!)
Canadian Open Data Rising Star
CRD Emergency Dashboard
Launched recently on July 16, 2025, the Dashboard has already become the region’s “one link to share” during fast-moving situations. It shortens the path from alert → understanding → action.
It:
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Centralizes multi-hazard signals;
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Links directly to preparedness actions (heat, tsunami, kits, plans); and
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Connects residents to municipal alerting systems for targeted notifications—improving uptake of open data where it matters most: in households and neighborhoods.
Canadian Open Data Leader of the Year
Dr. Diane Srivastava
Dr. Diane Srivastava founded and leads the Living Data Project as Director of the Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution and Professor at the University of British Columbia.
She founded the Living Data Project (LDP) in 2019 to meet two challenges for Canadian open data:
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Understanding how Canada’s biodiversity is changing, requires long-term ecological data. -
The widespread lack of training in reproducible data management.
The LDP solves both problems:
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It trains graduate students on best practices in research data management and reproducible research,
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then, pairs them with researchers or organizations with critical legacy datasets in need of data-rescue.
To create the LDP, she brought together a dozen university faculty across Canada to provide lectures, mentor data rescue internships, and organize working groups.
She successfully applied for a $1.65 million NSERC-CREATE grant which supports three postdoctoral scholars and a program coordinator who help run the program.
She obtained matching funds from four universities to increase this budget to ~2 million. She recently was awarded a $400K NSERC-Mitacs grant to extend this funding.