Building a comprehensive data inventory as required by section 6.3 of the Directive on Open Government:
“Establishing and maintaining comprehensive inventories of data and information resources of business value held by the department to determine their eligibility and priority, and to plan for their effective release.”
Creating a data inventory is among the first steps in identifying federal data that is eligible for release. Departmental data inventories has been published on the Open Government portal, Open.Canada.ca, so that Canadians can see what federal data is collected and have the opportunity to indicate what data is of most interest to them, helping departments to prioritize data releases based on both external demand and internal capacity.
The objective of the inventory is to provide a landscape of all federal data. While it is recognized that not all data is eligible for release due to the nature of the content, departments are responsible for identifying and including all datasets of business values as part of the inventory exercise with the exception of datasets whose title contains information that should not be released to be released to the public due to security or privacy concerns. These titles have been excluded from the inventory.
Departments were provided with an open data inventory template with standardized elements to populate, and upload in the metadata catalogue, the Open Government Registry. These elements are described in the data dictionary file.
Departments are responsible for maintaining up-to-date data inventories that reflect significant additions to their data holdings.
For purposes of this open data inventory exercise, a dataset is defined as:
“An organized collection of data used to carry out the business of a department or agency, that can be understood alone or in conjunction with other datasets”.
Please note that the Open Data Inventory is no longer being maintained by Government of Canada organizations and is therefore not being updated. However, we will continue to provide access to the dataset for review and analysis.