Excel

Digital soil map of the world and derived soil properties is a CD-ROM containing soil information for ten different continents. The ten continents listed include:

• Africa
• North America
• Central America
• South America
• Europe and West of the Ural
• Central and North East Asia
• Near East
• Far East
• South East Asia
• Australasia

This is a list of the types of files that can be found on the CD-ROM

• Vector files with a text file that gives information about the vector files
• Raster files in ERDAS and IDRIS with a text file that gives information about the raster files
• GIF, HTM And TIF files
• Arcview Project File Version 3.2

The files in this CD-ROM contain a text file that explains the content of the CD-ROM. There is a main paper  in the 1READ file known as NOTES that explains the different codes and abbreviations used in the different formats presented within this CD-ROM.

The Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics (CCJS), in co-operation with the policing community, collects police-reported crime statistics through the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey (UCR). The UCR Survey was designed to measure the incidence of crime in Canadian society and its characteristics.  This dataset contains specific incident rates for crime in the City of Toronto at the level of Census Tract. 

Incident rates are available for the following crime categories: violent crime, property crime, sexual assault, drug offences, shoplifting, criminal harassment, uttering threat, minor assault, major assault, robbery, theft from a motor vehicle, theft of a motor vehicle, break and enter, mischief, and "other theft".

The data are provided in .xls tabular format.  The data can be mapped using Statistics Canada Census 2006 shapefiles for census tracts in the City of Toronto (available from the Library). The Census Tract field, CTUID, needs to be modified to include the CMA number prior to joining the data to the boundary file.

This data contains information about tree species in Hamilton, Ontario. The attribute table contains information such as the diameter of a tree, the conditon of the tree, and whether the tree is likely to come in contact with a hydro utility line when it reaches its mature height. A boundary shapefile of Hamilton can also be included with the tree inventory shapefile so as to get a sense of the location of the trees.

The data provided by the City of Toronto is part of the Open Data initiative that many major cities are undertaking as a way of opening up city data to the public. The following data can be found on this website:

The data available in this catalogue is part of the Open Data initiative that allows the public access to municipal data. The set of data provided by the City of London, Ontario is somewhat limited to Parks and Recreation Department data. However, there is a likelihood that as the Open Data Catalog matures the City of London will increase the amount of available municipal data.

The data available includes Accessible facilities, Arenas, Baseball diamonds, Basketball courts, Community centres, Community gardens, Community pools, Dog off-leash parks, Football fields, Golf courses, Multi-use pads, Multi-use pathways, Outdoor ice rinks, Play structures, Skateboard parks, Soccer fields, Swing sets, Tennis courts, Wading pools, Washrooms, London City Boundary and Garbage & recycling collection zone boundaries.

Open Data Catalogue Beta: Vancouver City

Vancouver's open data catalogue consists of city data that have been made available to the public. Examples of data available in this catalogue include:

Business improvement sites, current city project package, block numbers, city owned properties, parks and recreation (community centres, dog-off leash areas, parks), city streets packages, city boundary, shoreline, election boundaries, facets, easements, schools (elementary school boundaries, early and late french emmersion schools, schools), Local areas, firehalls, heritage sites, homeless shelters, 2010 Olympics venues and transportation, public art, rapid transit package (lines and stations)), Sewer and sanitary package, street lighting package, water network package, non-market housing just to name a few. The datasets listed above are just a summary of the information available on the web http://data.vancouver.ca/datacatalogue/index.htm.

Datasets are available as texts, excel table, shapefiles, raster,  google earth format and web feed for information that is frequently updated. The datasets are usually accompanied with links to specific websites that will provide more information about the dataset. Data is frequently updated ensuring that a time accuracy is maintained. Most of the datasets are available for free and do not require a license.

The Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MOE) has created the user-friendly website Air Quality Ontario in order to provide Ontarians with current Air Quality Index (AQI) readings, historical ambient air pollution data air quality forecasts and current pollutant concentrations, as well as information on actions that can be taken when a smog alert is issued. 

Reports and forecasts of air quality (based on the AQI) can be browsed by city on the website, but downloadable datasets are also available.  Users can download historical data in the form of hourly readings of various pollutants (Ground-level Ozone, Nitrous Oxides etc.).  The datasets are provided by monitoring station location (e.g. "Hamilton West") in .csv format, which can be imported into Excel or ArcMap.  Also available from the website are "Smog Advisory Statistics", which give gives the dates on which "Smog Days" were declared and the areas in which they applied.  These datasets are provided in .xls format, which can be converted to .csv format in Excel to be imported to ArcMap.

Please note that therer is no geospatial data directly included in these datasets.  If users are interested in performing geospatial analysis in ArcMap, the locations of the monitoring stations or affected areas must be manually added by the user.  The website does provide the Lat-Long coordinates of each monitoring station when you download the hourly pollutant data for that station.

The Water Survey of Canada is a branch of Environment Canada which provides comprehensive flow or surface water level data for rivers across Canada.  For each hydrometric station, one can query daily or monthly flow or water level rates for the years that the station was active.  Some stations only have records for a few years, while others have records for over 80 consecutive years.  Some stations also have records for sediment loads and concentrations.

The data are not provided in any geospatial format, but there is an interactive Google Map interface which shows the location of currently active stations.  The metadata document also contains the latitude-longitude coordinates for each station.  The data can be viewed in an graphical format, which can calculate basic statistics about the data range (e.g. calculate the mean flow rate of a river over the course of a whole year).  The data can be viewed tabular format in the web browser, and can also be exported in .csv format, which can be exported into Microsoft Excel.

Daily climate data for 43,486 stations worldwide, covering the time period 1833 to 2008.

Includes information about precipition (in millimetres), snowfall (in millimetres), snow depth (in millimetres), maximum temperature (in degrees C), minimum temperature (in degrees C) and temperature at time of observation (in degrees C).

Data available varies for different countries, stations and years. Number of stations per country is also variable, with more data available for the United States than for other countries.

Data source = United States National Climatic Data Center, Global Historical Climatology Network. This product was purchased as a 12 CD-ROM set from EarthInfo Inc (http://www.earthinfo.com/databases/gd.htm)

Tabular data can be extracted from CDs using vendor-supplied access software in ASCII, Binary, DBASE and Lotus formats.