What is new with Open Data?
January 30th, 2019 – With a new year comes new datasets to our Open Data Catalogue. We have released three datasets which support education and awareness pertaining to bylaws and our direction to release the underpinning data presented in public-facing applications. The datasets are: Designated Smoking Area Receptacles, Residential Parking Zones, and Youth Advocate Program.
October 31st, 2018 – Our fourth Open Data release of 2018 includes a number of datasets that support transparency about services the municipality provides, as well as, supporting education and awareness pertaining to bylaws and legislation. The datasets include 311 Call Volumes, Active Travelways, Capital Projects, Service Requirements, Transit Automated Passenger Counts, Truck Routes and an enhancement to the HRM Tax Rates.
July 18th, 2018 – For our third release of 2018, we are pleased to add the following datasets to our Open Data Catalogue: Open Data Analytics, Planning Advisory Committee Boundaries and Street Name Routes
March 29th, 2018 – The award winning Halifax Solar City program offered by the Halifax Regional Municipality helps residents reduce their carbon emissions and benefit from solar energy for heating, hot water and electricity. A first of its kind in Canada, Solar City covers the complete, upfront solar installation costs for eligible property owners and allows them to repay over 10 years with an interest rate of 4.75%.
This is the first data set from the Solar City program to be released to the Open Data catalogue. Solar City Program – Solar Electric Generation with Micro-Inverters includes cumulative solar electric generation data readings at 5 minute intervals for solar electric systems installed through the program.
February 28th, 2018 – Our first release of 2018 brings 5 new datasets to the Open Data Catalogue. The new datasets include: Airport Runways, Boat Facilities, Community Plan Areas, Ferry Routes and View Planes. Please stay tuned, more datasets will be released in the up-coming months.
November 29th, 2017 – Halifax is happy to announce the release of 10 new datasets to our Open Data Catalogue. The new datasets released include the current HRM Tax Rates and 2016 Census data that was recently released through the Statistics Canada Census Program, including; Census 2016 Census Tracts, Census 2016 Dissemination Areas, Census 2016 Dissemination Blocks, Census 2016 Population Age Ranges, Census 2016 Population Ages, Census 2016 Population Marital Status Ages and Census 2016 Population Marital Status Sex. In the interests of maintaining our high standards of quality, we have also updated our Area Rate datasets to reflect changes to the groupings and naming as directed by Regional Council. Local Improvements Area Rates, Recreation Area Rates and Residents Association Area Rates have been removed and replaced with Community Facilities and Services Area Rates and Private Road Area Rates.
September 28th, 2017 – We have redesigned our Open Data site with a new look to better showcase data that Halifax has made available to the public. Our hope is that the new design allows users to search for data more easily with the introduction of themes and clearly displayed "feature datasets" that are in high demand or recently released. This is just the start of new exciting things to come for our Open Data program.
June 21st, 2017 – Great news! Three key datasets related to fire assets, winter maintenance and street routing are now available. Fire Services has released the location of Dry Hydrants. Transportation and Public Works has released; Ice Routes for snow clearing and the priority of service; and Street Junctions for locations of intersections and crosswalks.
Furthermore, we are very pleased to announce a collaboration with Halifax Water to host their open data datasets. Halifax Water Hydrant and Halifax Water Catchbasin are now available for download within the Halifax Open Data Catalogue, with the hope of more collaboration in the future.
May 3rd, 2017 – Datasets which experienced a scheme change as a result of the February 8th implementation, identified with the prefix of “Old” in the dataset name, will be removed from the catalogue on May 10th, 2017. In addition, the coordinate system of our datasets has been updated from MTM Zone 5 ATS77 to WGS 84.
February 8th, 2017 – The long awaited release of new datasets to the Open Data Catalogue has finally arrived. We are pleased to release 5 new datasets: Building Details, Outdoor Recreation Areas, Outdoor Recreation Equipment, Polling Districts 2012 and Polling Divisions 2012.
Four datasets in our current catalogue have experienced some changes resulting in new fields being added or deleted. To assist developers with the transition, the former dataset will include (old) after the dataset name indicating that the dataset will be removed from the Open Data catalogue on May 10th, 2017. Developers should redirect their applications to the following datasets as the API keys will change: Bus Stops, HRM Park Recreation Features, HRM Parks and Parking Meters. See Release Changes for a complete list of all the changes. We have also enabled datasets to be downloaded in file geodatabase format, a new feature recently released through ESRI Open Data upgrades.
February 1st, 2017 – Halifax Transit is launching the data feed to developers as a beta release. During this time, our team is monitoring the service for any issues and, only under rare circumstances, it may be necessary to turn off the service to address any technical problems that come up. Users of the real-time data may experience downtime or possible inaccuracies in data quality until our team has resolved any issues that are found.