Urban Studies and Open Data

Our newest addition to the team- Mike Dror

A few weeks ago Anil mentioned that if a picture can tell a thousand words, an interactive map can tell a million. Not bad. I think I’m in the right field of study.

My name is Mike Dror and I’m an Urban Studies student at the University of Toronto. I’ve been interning at Framework for the past few months as part of a seminar titled Urban Experiential Learning, where each student is placed at one of various urban organizations that range from small, non-profit organizations such as Framework, to larger public service institutions such as a Toronto City Councilor’s office.

The major part of my internship involves a long term project whose goal is to build on aspects of the Civic Footprint programming through the use of interactive mapping. A few weeks ago this project received a huge boon as the City of Toronto (finally) launched its open data set catalogue, following Vancouver’s example. The catalogue includes previously-unavailable data that can be used within Geographic Information Systems for analysis and display.

I’ve already felt the impact of the launch, both at Framework and within my own work. For a personal research project on the relationship between transit availability and demographics I’ve been using the newly-posted TTC Routes and Schedules data. For Framework I downloaded the Wards shapefile that contains boundaries for Toronto’s forty-four wards, a data set I could have used a month ago before I tediously drew them out myself, with far less accuracy.

The point is this. The catalogue received almost four thousand visits on its first day and over fifteen hundred downloads in its first week. Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at how we can use these to target information on organizations and resources through interactive mapping towards those who need and want them. Check back soon for an update.