Toronto launches new open data map site: Wellbeing Toronto

The City of Toronto’s long-awaited Wellbeing Toronto map site launched today (in beta), giving users the ability to map 140 officially-defined neighbourhoods by dozens of different data points, from arson to breast cancer screening to sports facilities. It’s a much more user-friendly approach to open data than we’ve seen in Toronto (and elsewhere) up till now.

Most of the possible maps are based on census criteria: age, income, ethnicity, employment.

Many of the grimmer social indicators take a familiar checkmark shape across the face of the city. Premature mortality, for example, works southeast from Rexdale down Black Creek Drive into the west end, through patchy parts of downtown and then northeast into Scarborough. It’s the shape of Bad Things in Toronto – it’s repeated on maps I’ve created with high school dropouts, STIs, homicides with male victims and on and on.

In any case, this is an outstanding resource, which brings together a lot of data that was always public, sort of, in a one-stop-shop format. The issues below are tweaks:

– Some work still needs to be done on user-friendliness. Library use is measured on a 1-8 scale, which I *think* represents average annual contacts with the library system per year, but that isn’t clearly explained.

– Actually, I’m not totally clear whether it’s up to me to divide any given number by population or whether that’s already done for me.

– The export-to-spreadsheet function isn’t working properly – it exports data other than the data in the preview.

-The user’s ability to move the map is constrained in such a way that it is hard to use the full menu and see eastern Scarborough.

– The category Transportation should eventually include data on commuting method (car/bike/walking/TTC). (The census data has all this information.) These are consistently fascinating maps.

What do you think? Discuss Wellbeing Toronto on Twitter at #WBtor.

Patrick Cain is a senior web coordinator with Globalnews.ca. He’s been creating map based data visualizations for the past four years.