EDMONTON—Throughout the world government agencies and nonprofit organizations compile data about pollution, however, the public has had little opportunity to apply the data in daily life. A new website allows Canadians to find chemical facilities in their neighbourhood that emit pollutants and compare the emission rates to other facilities throughout Canada.
After submitting an street address to the website, Emitter.ca, all polluting facilities listed in Environment Canada’s database within a user-defined radius of the address will be shown on a map.
“We look at all facilities and we compute their total pollution. Then we rank people on where they rate against that, so if you’re in the 70th percentile that means … you are the 70th most polluting facility,” said David Eaves, a public policy entrepreneur and an open government activist.
The site is the brainchild of Eaves and Microsoft Canada open source strategy leader Nik Garkusha, who thought of the idea while exploring ways to collaborate on an open data project involving federal government information. Eaves suggested using Environment Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) data and presenting it in a way that would be interesting to the average user.
The two agreed on the idea, and soon a six-member cross-country team was formed. The task of analyzing the NPRI data and presenting it in a simple format was trusted to Matthew Dance, a graduate student at the University of Alberta whose credentials include environmental policy consulting for the government of Alberta and other organizations.
The project took shape in about six weeks, and the beta version was launched last Wednesday. The team is now fixing software glitches that users have found and is considering adding more functionality.
“I think one of the interesting things for this is that actually it isn’t that challenging,” says Eaves, adding that the real challenge was finding people with the right skills for the job.
What’s most noteworthy about the project, he says, is that it makes the data useful to the end user.
“I think people out there have done stuff with data before, but they are all just giving Canadians, for example, what are the total absolute numbers of pollutants, and unless you are a chemist or a doctor, that probably has no meaning for you,” Eaves says.
“So we try to interpret the data in a way that we rank the facilities based on how they compare to other facilities, so that gives you at least a baseline so you can say, ‘Oh this facility emits a lot compared to other facilities, that’s probably a bad thing.’”
For the next version, the team is looking into refining the methodology to break down the pollution listing to specific chemicals and factor in the amount of more harmful emissions versus less harmful emissions into the ranking system.
Other possibilities the team is experimenting with include adding health data for each region, such as incidences of tumors and asthma, to see the correlations between pollution and the health issues.
Aaron McGowan, the London, Ontario-based lead developer on the team, says for him the main attraction to the project was having an opportunity to present how open data can be used to benefit the public.
“We can actually give to the federal government a real example of why it’s important not only to them but also to Canadian citizens that they should start releasing the data, start practicing the open standards and open data philosophies,” he says.
Both McGowan and Eaves are open government advocates who would like to see a formal open data policy at the federal level.
“We have an opportunity to make Canadians aware of what’s happening in their neighborhood, empower them with better sources, and we can only do that if we’re given some data to work with from the government,” Eaves says.
If the developers can create a website for the United States, they are likely to have innumerable visitors.
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