Introduction to Open Data

Imagine you have an idea for a piece of software. Let us say it is an app to find the most efficient route between your classes. You spend the weekend working on your idea. After some long nights, scribbled designs on paper and a dozen crushed Red Bulls in the garbage, you run it and it works!

Hearing about your success, friends come asking to try out this app. You then explain, “To get the app to work, I had to do a bunch of rough estimates of the distance between buildings and rooms”. For them to be able to use your app, they must put in what classes they are taking, where the classes are, and the rough distances between each location. That is very time-consuming and a lot of work.

Now imagine a world where you make your app, you plug it into an existing UWindsor Open Data API, and all the users must do is sign in and put in which classes they are taking. The rest is handled by the UWindsor Open Data API.

Open Data or an Open Data Initiative (or Policy) is a service that a group provides that gives their data as data sets or an API to be easily accessible by the public.

Right about now, you may be asking, “Why do I care? What does it mean for me?” That is a particularly good question. Open Data lets us create tools that we have not even thought of yet.

The University of Waterloo has an Open Data Initiative, and they have a tremendous number of apps made by students. The point is empowering students to create exactly what they want, how they want, with amazing tools.

Do you want an Open Data Initiative at the University of Windsor? CSS agrees! Now how do you get it? Well, you can help CSS convince the university to create this initiative. If interested, send an email to css@uwindsor.ca and let us know exactly how much you want it.

If you want to read more about it, you can read our proposal.