Data

Overview:

A key objective of the CIMS is to increase access by members to geospatial data related to population health.  However, CIMS is not a data portal, as this is not financially sustainable for modest budget voluntary sector organizations.  The CIMS represents a collaborative infrastructure which develops sustainable data access models to leverage access to the best available data within the means of members.  The CIMS is not so much about the data which is provided centrally, but more about what the members contribute to the collective.  Subject matter is significantly user defined, with the mapping portal representing the means for members to access and share data. The CIMS has been designed to be continuously expanding with respect to the content available, based on the needs of and contributions by members. We value community access to and use of social data and technologies, and to the extent possible within the business model, will implement this initiative in a manner which utilizes and supports resources and protocols which support an infrastructure of community access (including the Canadian Geospatial Data Initiative, the Canadian Social Data Consortium (CSDS) and data liberation initiatives such as CivicAccess.ca.)

The CIMS provides or enables several sources and types of population health information.  There are two broad types of information:

a)  Information available to all users:

• a modest amount of “foundational” data related to the non-medical determinants of health and community characteristics, as outlined in the population health section of the website.  Much of this information is socio-economic or socio-demographic information available to the public from Statistics Canada or other data sources (e.g. The Community Information Database of The Rural Secretariat.).    This is normally available at the geographic level of census tract for urban areas (roughly 3,000 people) and of census sub-division for non-urban areas (roughly equivalent to a township or a small town)
• data available through data access initiatives such as the Canadian Geospatial Data Initiative.  For example, this includes some environmental data and some data on community characteristics such as the location of community services.

This data has been selected to be of significant utility in rural areas, with respect to content, geographic level of data (census sub-division) and concepts.
This information is available to all members and will be continuously expanded through the development of thematic atlases (collections of maps and data) and through members of the CIMS collaborating to negotiate access to, or create datasets which are relevant for core users.
 

b) Information available only to the individual member or to a designated group of members

• members can add their own data, and in a secure environment, combine it with the information available above.  Such information could include client data or custom Statistics Canada data which the member had purchased.
• members can add their own data based on street addresses (for instance, client or service data)
• members who are part of data consortium such as the CSDS have access to selected dataset of the consortium data and can request additional consortium data to be loaded in the CIMS.