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Who loves data? ... I can't hear you! Who loves data? Everyone loves data, and the Government has lots of it. In this case, I'm referring to the Government of Canada. Celebrating its one year anniversary, the Open Data Pilot Project is, well, one year old now. I would like to thank David Eaves for promoting it via his blog ( Sharing ideas about data.gc.ca ; http://eaves.ca/2012/03/15/sharing-ideas-about-data-gc-ca ).
This is a very large topic; it is too large to cover in a single blog post. Instead, I'll share what I've done yesterday and today playing with the dataset named " Data.gc.ca Portal Catalogue ".
I'm sure it will be fixed soon enough, but the file itself seemed to have character encoding problems. It is in the "latin1" character set, but has unicode characters crammed into it. This caused me hours of grief over two days to diagnose and fix it into something that displayed mostly correct. If you are a MySQL user (or any SQL), this basic utf-8 SQL file should save you the time of trying to import and convert it. data_gc_ca-all_datasets.zip (830KB zip file, 11.5MB expanded)