Toronto Open Data: CKAN portal under a bespoke municipal licence

🤖 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

The city wrote its own open licence, unusually clear about attribution and termination. Of 554 catalogue datasets, 115 actually name it and 284 are tagged 'License not specified'.

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 byCity of Toronto (Office of the Chief Information Officer)

Scale🏙️ City-wide

Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 9 more in Toronto · 📊 Open data guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects

Toronto opened one of Canada's first municipal data portals in November 2009 and rebuilt it on CKAN in 2018; the catalogue held 554 datasets in July 2026, with records edited the same day. Council adopted an Open Data Master Plan for 2018-2022 — a strategy document that created no publishing duty and no reporting cadence — and has run annual roadmaps since it lapsed. Data is offered under the Open Government Licence – Toronto, a bespoke deed adapted from Ontario's OGL 1.0 that permits commercial reuse in perpetuity if reusers print 'Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Toronto.'

Live 📅 since 2009

📊 Impact

115 of 554 datasets carry the Open Government Licence – Toronto in their CKAN metadata; 284 are tagged 'License not specified' and the rest carry no licence field (city CKAN API, 26 July 2026)

🎓 Lesson

A bespoke municipal deed only reaches as far as the metadata that names it. Toronto's licence is unusually clear about attribution, exclusions and termination, yet four in five catalogue records do not cite it, so a careful reuser cannot tell from the record alone what they are allowed to do.

📡 Data & IoT Open data Digital government

Sources

↗ City of Toronto — Open Data Licence (Open Government Licence – Toronto)The deed itself. Grants a 'worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive licence to use' the information, including commercially, to 'copy, modify, publish, translate, adapt, distribute or otherwise use the Information in any medium, mode or format for any lawful purpose.' Requires the statement 'Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Toronto.' where the provider gives no specific wording. Not revocable at will: 'the rights granted to you under this licence … will end automatically' only on breach, with no cure or reinstatement clause. States it 'is based on version 1.0 of the Open Government Licence – Ontario'.

↗ City of Toronto — Open Data Licence (toronto.ca text, exclusions)Same deed on the corporate site. Sets out the exemptions: personal information, information unavailable under Ontario's freedom of information acts, third-party rights, official symbols, and patented or trademarked material. Adds a no-endorsement clause — the licence 'does not grant you any right to use the Information in a way that suggests any official status or that the Information Provider endorses you' — an as-is disclaimer, and Ontario governing law.

↗ City of Toronto CKAN API — package_searchQueried through the CKAN API directly rather than the website, on 26 July 2026. Returns count 554. The license_id facet returns open-government-licence-toronto 115 and notspecified 284; the balance carries no licence value. The 115 figure was confirmed independently with q=license_id:'open-government-licence-toronto'&rows=0. Currency check: the first package returned, Members of Toronto City Council – Voting Record, shows metadata_modified 2026-07-26T18:09:54.

↗ Toronto City Council — item 2018.EX30.12, Toronto's Open Data Master PlanExecutive Committee 24 January 2018; City Council adopted 31 January and 1 March 2018, 35-0. Council 'approved the Open Data Master Plan set out in Attachment 1' to the 10 January 2018 report of the Deputy City Manager and Chief Information Officer. The only report-back attached was a one-off review, due 19 June 2018, of the steps needed to 'ensure the publishing of Open Data will protect the City's commercially confidential and proprietary interests' — there is no recurring compliance or inventory report.

↗ City of Toronto — Open Data Master PlanConfirms the plan covers 2018-2022 and is framed as a strategic vision co-developed with the public. The page states no open-data-by-default obligation, no data inventory requirement and no Council reporting cycle, and carries no completion status.

Show 2 more sourcesShow fewer

↗ City of Toronto Open Data — 2026 RoadmapPublished 4 February 2026. Nine initiatives for Q1-Q4 2026, including an Open Data Dashboard, third-party dataset guidelines, an incubator and a data quality scoring upgrade. Explicitly organised around the 2018 Master Plan's four themes and notes most deliverables are checked off but with 'lots of room for improvement' — the plan was not renewed after 2022 but was not abandoned either.

↗ City of Toronto Open Data — About and programme historyDates the first portal to fall 2009 and the current in-house rebuilt portal to 2018; the programme timeline records a 'CKAN 2.9 Upgrade' in 2022, confirming the platform. Notes an 'Open Data License Refreshed' milestone in 2010.

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇺🇸 Washington D.C.'s open data policy, ArcGIS Hub portal and licence · Washington D.C. D.C. dedicates its data to the public domain but ships CC BY in the metadata; Toronto's own deed appears in 115 of 554 records. 🇺🇸 City of Miami Open Data: A Live GIS Hub and a Stalled Portal · Miami Miami legislated nothing and ships a CC BY deed on almost every dataset; Toronto wrote its own licence and names it on one record in five. 🇨🇦 311 Toronto: Service Requests, Open Data and Service Standards · Toronto The 311 service requests are one of these 554 datasets — published monthly, with a status field but no closure date and no target.

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). “Toronto Open Data: CKAN portal under a bespoke municipal licence” — Toronto, Canada. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/toronto-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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