Montreal Open Data Portal & Digital Data Charter

🤖 AI-generated summary · 🔎 Last verified 2026-07-26

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means

Every one of the 405 datasets names a licence in its metadata, not just on a terms-of-use page. The ethical charter layered on top produced 13 principles, no register and no published audit.

Outcome🔄 Ongoing

Evidence🏛️ Official

what does this mean?

The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →

Run byVille de Montreal — Service des technologies de l'information, with the Laboratoire d'innovation urbaine for the Charte

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 7 more in Montreal · 📊 Open data guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects

Montreal has published municipal open data since the early 2010s, today from a CKAN catalogue at donnees.montreal.ca. A Politique de donnees ouvertes overhauled in December 2015 committed the city to 'ouverture par defaut' and to publishing an inventory of the data it holds, whatever its openness; a Charte des donnees numeriques presented in October 2020 added 13 ethical principles. Both are policy instruments rather than by-laws, and no compliance reporting on either was found. Every one of the 405 datasets in the catalogue names a licence in its metadata.

Live 📅 since 2011

📊 Impact

405 datasets in the catalogue on 26 July 2026, of which 403 carry Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 and 2 carry Canada's Open Government Licence 2.0 — no dataset is published without a named licence.

🎓 Lesson

A licence only governs reuse where it actually reaches the dataset metadata, not just the terms-of-use page. Montreal names one on all 405 records; the ethical charter layered on top produced principles but no register, no audit and no published account of whether it is followed.

📡 Data & IoT Open data Digital government

Sources

↗ Ville de Montreal — CKAN API, package_search with license_id facetQueried directly against the CKAN API rather than the website, 26 July 2026. Returns 'count': 405 and exactly two licence buckets: {'name': 'cc-by', 'display_name': 'Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International', 'count': 403} and {'name': 'OGL-Canada-2.0', 'display_name': 'Licence du gouvernement ouvert a Canada', 'count': 2}. 403 + 2 = 405, so there is no unlicensed remainder. Dataset records carry 'license_url': 'http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/', i.e. the unmodified international deed, not a municipal one.

↗ Ville de Montreal — Licence d'utilisation des donnees ouvertesThe city adopted Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International 'le 27 fevrier 2014' by 'la resolution CG14 0091 du Conseil d'agglomeration'. Conditions: users must 'crediter les donnees et les contenus que vous utilisez' and say whether they modified or drew interpretations from them, and 'Vous ne pouvez pas restreindre l'acces aux donnees et contenus originaux' — you may not restrict access to the originals the city shared.

↗ Ville de Montreal — Notre demarche (Politique de donnees ouvertes)States the open-by-default rule verbatim: 'Ouvert par defaut : toute donnee collectee ou acquise par la Ville de Montreal est consideree comme ouverte a moins d'une justification pour en restreindre l'acces.' The city also commits to publishing 'un inventaire des donnees sous sa fiducie, peu importe leur degre d'ouverture' (an inventory of the data in its stewardship, whatever its degree of openness), and describes the Charte as setting out 'un ensemble de principes ethiques encadrant la gestion des donnees et leurs usages a la Ville'.

↗ CNW/Newswire — Montreal adopte une Politique de donnees ouvertes reposant sur le concept d'ouverture par defautDates the policy: adopted 9 December 2015 and put to the conseil municipal on 14 December for approval. A companion release frames it as a 'refonte' — an overhaul of the earlier policy from the 2011-2012 demarche, not a first adoption. Confirms it is a politique adopted by council resolution, with no by-law (reglement) anywhere in the chain.

↗ Ville de Montreal — Inventaire de donnees (dataset)The Politique's one concrete, checkable deliverable, and it is live: 'Inventaire de donnees collige par la Ville de Montreal dans le cadre de l'application de la Politique de donnees ouvertes' — an inventory compiled in application of the policy, covering central services, boroughs and agglomeration competencies. CKAN metadata: created 2018-02-19, last modified 2026-05-06, so still maintained.

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↗ Ville de Montreal — Charte des donnees numeriques (PDF, octobre 2020)The charter itself, dated October 2020. Initiated in May 2019 at the launch of Montreal numerique and drafted with the Laboratoire d'innovation urbaine, the Service des technologies de l'information, and academic and community partners.

↗ Ville de Montreal — La charte des donnees numeriques au service de la collectiviteEstablishes that the Charte is hortatory, not binding: it sets out 'les engagements que prend la Ville' (commitments the city makes) to frame 'la collecte, la gestion et l'utilisation des donnees de facon ethique et responsable dans l'espace urbain'. 13 principles under 3 headings — guaranteeing human rights in the digital age; the primacy of the general interest and the common good; putting data to work for the future. No algorithm register, accountability framework or reporting mechanism is named.

↗ Ville de Montreal — CKAN API, status_showConfirms the platform: 'ckan_version': '2.11.5', 'site_title': 'Site web des donnees ouvertes de la Ville de Montreal', with a 'montreal_theme' extension plus dcat, harvest, spatial and datastore extensions. Queried 26 July 2026.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇨🇦 Toronto Open Data: CKAN portal under a bespoke municipal licence · Toronto Toronto wrote its own deed and names it on 115 of 554 datasets; Montreal took the unmodified CC BY 4.0 and names a licence on all 405. 🇺🇸 Washington D.C.'s open data policy, ArcGIS Hub portal and licence · Washington D.C. D.C. promises the public domain on its policy page and ships CC BY in the metadata; Montreal's deed and its metadata say the same thing. 🇨🇦 Montreal Non-Residential Water Metering, After the Cancelled Contract · Montreal Open by default, with an exception: the meter register is published, the readings behind it withheld as commercially confidential.

Who may reuse the city's data?

Four portals, four rungs of the licence ladder. The interesting differences are legal, not technical: what a re-user is actually allowed to do, and whether the permission is written down at all.

Who may reuse the city's data? — side-by-side comparison of 4 atlas entries; the "Cost" column honestly shows "not public" where no figure was ever published.
Project	Since	Status	Outcome	Evidence	Run by	Cost	Who may reuse the data
DataSF and San Francisco's Open Data LawSan Francisco, 🇺🇸	2009	Live	Ongoing	Official	City government	not public	A recorded public-domain dedication — anyone, for anything, in writing. The most generous rung of the ladder.
Montreal Open Data Portal & Digital Data CharterMontreal, 🇨🇦	2011	Live	Ongoing	Official	City government	not public	One open licence across the whole catalogue, with no unlicensed remainder — the cleanest audited count in the atlas.
Toronto Open Data: CKAN portal under a bespoke municipal licenceToronto, 🇨🇦	2009	Live	Ongoing	Official	City government	not public	A bespoke attribution licence exists — but most catalogue records never name it, so the permission is real and largely undeclared.
Shanghai Public Data Open Platform & SODA ContestShanghai, 🇨🇳	2012	Live	Ongoing	Official	City government	not public	Downloadable in tiers, but no open licence anywhere: reuse rights are never granted in writing.

Explore the wider context

🗺️ Your City's Problem Map Is Really a Map of Who Complains 📖 Open data 📖 Urban data platform (UDP)📖 Building performance standard (BPS)

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Montreal Open Data Portal & Digital Data Charter” — Montreal, Canada. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/montreal-open-data/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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