New data services now available

If information wants to be free, then data wants to be liberated. In 2001, after a five-year trial, Statistics Canada officially started a project called the Data Liberation Initiative, involving all the major Canadian universities through the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. The idea was to lower the price of access to major Canadian data files such as social science surveys and geographical information. SFU Librarian for Research Data Services Walter Piovesan has been working on the Data Liberation Initiative since day one. Recently he has helped organize the four major BC university libraries in a province-wide, web-based service called ABACUS for accessing data files and documentation. The software was developed by and is hosted at UBC library data services.  SFU researchers can now access the resource via the Library website Get Data.

The new service offers GIS data sets and will include a NESSTAR data server for online analysis of selected Canadian surveys. NESSTAR stands for "Networked Social Science Tools and Resources" and was developed by English and Norwegian universities as a web application to make it easier to locate, access and analyse statistical information online.

Social science survey data such as the census and the omnibus survey from Statistics Canada and SLID (Survey of Labour Income Dynamics) are now available through the Data Liberation Initiative. The new ABACUS interface allows users to effortlessly search and browse all the available datasets including DMTI Spatial, Ortho Photos and Canadian Business Patterns. "Professors and researchers are used to getting data in an old fashioned way via WebDav which has a poor interface," says Piovesan. With ABACUS, researchers can search and browse all the available datasets with nothing more than a web-browser. All that is required is a login using their university IDs.

ABACUS is a partnership between SFU, UBC, UNBC and UVic. "There never was an easy way to get at all these resources," says Piovesan, but now there is, thanks to data liberation.