Blog article: Toronto Open Data’s 2026 Roadmap
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We spent the tail end of 2025 sorting out what our team would focus on in 2026. Here’s what we decided, why we decided it, and how we figured this out.
Why a public roadmap?
We made a roadmap so we can share with others what we’re focusing on in 2026 and to keep ourselves accountable. There are a million compelling problems to tackle around open data in Toronto, and we want to be clear which we’ve chosen to tackle this year. Sure, we could make a roadmap and keep it to ourselves, but that’s not really in the spirit of “open”, so this roadmap is public.
Why choose what we chose?
To help us decide what to work on, we looked to user research done in the early days of the program. 20 consultations were done with 125 stakeholders and 42 community advisory board members from in and out of the city bureaucracy. These consultations ended up making Toronto’s Open Data Master Plan; the document we’ve used to guide our 2026 roadmap.
Based on its consultations, the Open Data Master Plan is split into 4 big themes. Each theme has overarching ideals to strive for, and specific deliverables to do. We’ve already checked off most of the “specific deliverables” boxes here, but also know there is lots of room for improvement.
These themes are:
- Foundation: the program and its technology are transparent, and making high quality data
- Integration: the program publishes data in harmony with other city divisions
- Connection: the program works with and engages community partners
- Activation: the program enables its users
These are each pretty large, so we did some work to figure out where and how we could improve the program along these 4 lines.
How did we choose?
We looked at the themes above, looked at our program, and came up with some open-ended “How might we” questions:
How might we…
- …identify and act on data quality issues so that the quality of our datasets are consistently high/increasing over time?
- …create opportunities for divisional data owners to engage with community?
- …engage with businesses that use open data so to better accommodate their needs?
- …prepare ourselves for AI agents as users?
- …improve the experience of users on the portal so they can more easily create impactful artefacts/solutions/data products?
As a team, we looked at these questions and discussed several dozen possible answers. We took those answers, found common threads, and reconciled those with resourcing constraints (we don’t have enough hours to do everything we want to do) and leadership direction (so we don’t step on our sister teams’ toes) to make our 2026 roadmap.
What’s on the 2026 roadmap?
| Name | Due | What is it? | Why? |
| Google SEO | Q1 2026 | We want Google to add our dataset pages to their search results more often | Currently, you can’t find open.toronto.ca dataset pages through a google search |
| 3rd Party Datasets | Q1 2026 | We’ll publish guidelines for publishing data sourced from a group outside the city bureaucracy | This enriches the variety of data on open.toronto.ca and helps us enable community users |
| Open Data Dashboard | Q1 2026 | Performance metrics for the program put into one (not-yet-to-be-public-facing) spot | We have a lot of metrics we look at, but we haven’t put the work in to centralize them. this year, this will just be for us to look at, and in the future we’ll share this out. |
| 2025 Open Data Awards | Q1 2026 | Our 2nd annual Open Data Awards! | We want to celebrate people using open data |
| Staff Reports to Open Data | Q2 2026 | We’re integrating the process of publishing staff reports to city council and committees with our portal, adding opportunities for data associated with staff reports to be published | This enriches the variety of data on the portal by including data relevant to important decisions being made by city leadership |
| Open Data Incubator | Q3 2026 | Working with open data projects in the community to improve their success | This will enable community projects using open data. We’re hoping it will be a useful place for us to learn about our usership, too |
| Automated Alerts | Q3 2026 | Automated alerts when datasets are published/updated, etc | We know we have repeat users, and we’ve had people approach us asking for a way to get alerted when the portal changes. |
| Data Publishing Plans | Q4 2026 | Annual plans from each data-owning city division on what they plan to publish or update on the portal | This reduces the work city divisions have to do to publish data, and lets us broadcast what we’re planning on publishing in a given year |
| Data Quality Score Upgrade | Q4 2026 | Updating our Data Quality Scoring algorithm to make it more useful for city divisions | Our data quality scoring algorithm currently helps the open data team quickly identify issues with a dataset. However, there are kinds of issues that aren’t identified in the current algorithm that we’d like to add |
| AI Enabled Search | Q4 2026 | Adding AI to our site’s search bar | Our sister team has made investments into AI software this past year, and our team will be leveraging that to improve the search experience of users on open.toronto.ca |
What didn’t make the cut?
A lot!
We worked with some folks in 2025 to make a proof-of-concept MCP server. Since, a few others have emerged from the woodwork with their own versions of an MCP server tailored for open.toronto.ca. We would love to incorporate that work into our own MCP server and host it ourselves, but we aren’t planning on investing staff time into that this year.
We wanted to add more, large spatial datasets to our portal (specifically raster data or point clouds from LiDAR). We knew that would be valuable to a lot of folks, and we don’t have capacity to provide that data cleanly right now.
We also wanted to put more effort into adding built-in visualization tools on our dataset pages, work towards a standardized glossary of terms to be used among common attributes in our datasets, and connect dataset pages to associated staff reports, projects, and toronto.ca visualizations, but aren’t planning on delivering those in 2026.