GO Open Data ConferenceMay 1-2, 2015

Darren Platakis

(H)BSc. Geography – Brock University (2010)

P/G Certificate – GIS/Geospatial Management – Niagara College (2011)

Founded Geospatial Niagara – (January 2013)

College of Fellows – Royal Canadian Geographical Society – (2013)

Geospatial Niagara officially a not-for-profit – (June 2014)

Vision:

A Niagara in which all citizens are engaged citizens through geographic awareness and access to geospatial technologies and geospatial information.

Mission:

To promote geo-literacy and community participation through geography.

Open Data – acquired plays a huge role in our ability to engage students and invest them within their communities.

Data Collected – plays a huge role in our ability to educate and to contribute to broader data sets or create new ones.

Community engagement initiative to crowd-source data about the Urban Forests of Niagara’s 12 municipalities.

Environmental, educational, economic and social benefits.

Utilizes open data in the form of existing, possibly incomplete tree inventories – municipal government, community organizations to be completed via volunteers

Creates open data in the form of student/citizen collected information

Database can be queried and results exported for use in other applications