KITCHENER - The City of Kitchener launched a new online portal to make it easier to access almost 100 different data sets, from an inventory of trees to where the city issued parking tickets.

The city began offering access to data sets in 2014 as part of efforts to create an open government, one that opens up city operations to its citizens and also allows greater input from residents, said Dan Murray, Kitchener's director of technology.

The portal, launched along with the release of another seven data sets, allows people to search for data using key words and provides a visual map for data that's tied to a particular location. It also lets users set up APIs - application programming interfaces - that make the data more usable and shareable, and lets users subscribe to the data in real time, so they don't have to keep coming back to update the data.

Over the past two years, the city has gradually been releasing more information, as long as it presents no privacy or legal concerns. The data can include everything from the mapped contours of the entire city - useful to planners and developers - to what building permits are issued.

Some data sets are downloaded as often as 10 times a month, with building permits and the city's road network being the most popular.

"Part of the challenge with open data is understanding what people want, and what is of value to them," Murray said.

Open data is of particular interest to researchers and to entrepreneurs who may create apps that could mine the data and commercialize it in useful, marketable ways. For instance, someone was interested in using the data to come up with a way to predict water main breaks, Murray said.

Providing it isn't very costly or time-consuming, Murray said. In fact, because the city was already releasing some of this data by request, a portal that allows people to get the data themselves can actually save staff time.

Murray admits it's hard to measure how much interest there is in the data, other than seeing how often a data set is downloaded.

"We like it when people contact us because it gives us a sense of how it's being used."