GoC Open Data

The extension for Open Data of Government of Canada is to bring open data to your fingertips. It helps you to search, use, and manage GoC Open Data.

It has the following major features:

1. An option page allows you to input keywords for searching datasets. Returned datasets are displayed in the format of links to the owner org's website if the url is provided in the dataset, or else links to the data.gc.ca site are displayed.

2. Search term and results are saved in HTML5 local storage so that they persist during browser restarts. Counter of unvisited links are displayed on the extension icon shown to the right of the Chrome toolbar.

3. A Javascript listener monitors links clicked by you and update the plugin counter in the background.

4. Functionality to allow you to share interested datasets on your social media websites including Twitter and Facebook. For twitter, URL and title of the dataset are pre-populated in the Twitter share screen, which makes sharing very handy.

5. Multilingual support. All extension pages support both two official languages - English or French depending on the current browser locale.

6. HTML5 messaging API is used to dynamic update and synchronize contents across different pages without introducing the confusion of page refreshes.

7. If Geocoding information (spatial element in the CKAN datasets) is provided, a custom Google Map is provided to show the distance between your current location and the event location in the interested datasets. For example, if you search "Severe Thunderstorms", datasets of Natural Resource Canada will be returned.