Canadian Open Data and Free Geospatial Data Resources: Almost anyone in the geospatial community would agree that a major part of any GIS project would be the data sets involved. The data can be in the form of vectors, rasters, aerial photography or statistical tabular data and most often the data component can be very costly or labor intensive. But it doesn’t always have to be that way, as there are plenty of great resources available that offer free Canadian open data that you can use with your geomatics projects to generate geospatial products. In fact more and more are popping up all over the web and some cities like Ottawa are even having contests to help promote the use of their data.
Over the past few years we have been highlighting and promoting various cities and provinces in Canada that have done a great job providing Open Geospatial Data and geospatial applications to the public. During that time there has been plenty of great praise, feedback and emails regarding these efforts in helping to promote Canadian geospatial data and ensuring that everybody in the geomatics community knows where to find data for their projects.
We started this page in 2010 as a way to collaborate links to all Canadian Open Data (sites that offer data downloads at no cost and without restrictions), free geospatial data, online web mapping applications and other sources of geospatial information (including National, Provincial and Municipal levels).