The Nova Scotia government has joined the world of open data.

On Friday, it officially launched a web portal that allows the public to access 137 different sets of raw data.

It's a wide variety of information that ranges from historical land grants to traffic volumes to angling and government employee absenteeism records. The information can be sorted and graphed.

Premier Stephen McNeil helped launch the site.

"Open data is about making government data available to anyone to use and reuse for any purpose," he said. "It's driven by the belief that government data belongs to the people."

Bill Wilson, CEO of Mindsea, said companies such as his that design apps will be able to use the information to make decisions.

"Say traffic volumes on a particular street," he said. "If they're going to build a new retail outlet. Is that traffic volume increasing year over year? Should we open up there?"

"I think there's definitely a lot of the data sets that are available in the new open data portal that will be really useful," he said.