Data Licences
There are three licencing options for data published data in the BC Data Catalogue:
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Access only is a statement of use that is restrictive as defined in the Crown Copyright Page.
- “reproduction or distribution is not permitted without written permission.”
- A user is then required to request permission through the IPP office form and does have a fee associated with it.
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Open Government Licence - British Columbia
For data that is under the Intellectual Property or “ownership of the Province of BC and meets all the requirements of being open data, it is recommended to publish data under an Open Government Licence, where possible, as it is much more permissive.
To publish a dataset under OGL-BC, follow the full steps here but in brief you will need to obtain the required authorizations as noted in the Open Data Assessment and Checklist.
These include:
- The Ministry Information Security Officer (MISO)
- The Intellectual Properties Office (email)
- The Custodial organization’s Deputy Minister or designated alternate
Once these approvals are in place, Data can be published under OGL-BC if:
- it is in an open format, e.g., CSV, Shape File (SHP), JSON, or additional formats noted by the OCIO’s Open Data Physical Dataset Format Standard.
- The Catalogue record links to the appropriate Open Data Licence.
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The Catalogue contains datasets licenced under many other Open Government Licences, from the Broader Public Sector to Federal licences.
Federal Licences are listed as there are times when BC Government employees require data to be published for their own consumption via one or more channels.
New licences can be added to the drop down.