The open data community in Ottawa has a reason to celebrate this morning.  Ottawa City Council has given the green light to the release of municipal datasets in open formats, with the launch of their data catalogue, officially still in beta at www.ottawa.ca/opendata.

The terms of use for these datasets is for “world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to use, modify, and distribute the datasets in all current and future media and formats for any lawful purpose”.

The very limited catalogue launched today includes SHP files for municipal landmarks including parks, museums, sports fields, wading pools and splash parks.  The catalogues format has columns setup to support other formats including CSV, XLS, DWG, and KML — a very similar layout to the Vancouver Open Data Catalogue.

In addition to the official city website, dataott.org has also been launched.  This site, being billed by the city has the “community-led discussion”, is a location for users to request additional datasets they would like to see released.

Today’s success puts Ottawa on a growing list of Canadian municipalities now publishing open data, including Vancouver, Edmonton, and Toronto.

Thank you to the city councilors who voted in favour of this endeavor. Also, thank you to everyone who has been involved in bringing awareness to this issue – including, but of course not limited to Edward Ocampo-Gooding, Mary Beth Baker, Thomas Cort, Daniel Beauchamp, Mark Faul, Shawn Simister, Willem van Bergen, Robert Giggey, Derek Gour, Chris Taggart, and more.