The Open Database of Educational Facilities

Catalogue number: 37-26-0001
Issue number: 2022001

The Open Database of Educational Facilities (ODEF) is a collection of open data containing the names, types, and locations of education facilities across Canada, and is made available under the Open Government Licence - Canada.

The ODEF brings together data primarily originating from open data portals and webpages controlled by municipal and provincial governments. This database aims to enhance access to a harmonized collection of building addresses across various themes of public interest across Canada. This database is a component of the Linkable Open Data Environment (LODE).

Data sources and methodology

The inputs for the ODEF are primarily datasets provided by municipal, regional or provincial sources available to the general public through open government portals under various types of open data licences, or otherwise published on their webpages and released under an open licence with their permission.

The ODEF was created by gathering the microdata on educational facilities from open data portals, provincial or territorial websites (with permission from the data owners), and one federal department.

The current version of the database (version 2.1) contains approximately 19,000 records. Collection of data from the above indicated data providers was from August 2019 to March 2022. The individual datasets were collected from their respective sources and processed and harmonized into the ODEF. Within the original datasets, each data provider attached a different set of variables. To see the full list of variables provided by a given data provider, please visit the original sources which are linked in the metadata document that accompanies the ODEF.

The variables included in the ODEF are as follows:

• Facility Name
• Facility Type
• Authority Name
• International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) Level
• Official Language Minority School Status
• Address
• Unit
• Street Number
• Street Name
• Municipality Name
• Province
• Postal Code
• Province Unique Identifier
• Census Subdivision Name
• Census Subdivision Unique Identifier
• Census Metropolitan Area Name
• Census Metropolitan Area Unique Identifier
• Longitude
• Latitude
• Geocoding Source
• Source ID
• Unique ID

For more information on how the addresses and variables were compiled, see the metadata document that accompanies the ODEF.

Downloading the ODEF

For ease of download, the ODEF and accompanying metadata document is provided as a compressed CSV.

• ODEF Version 2.1

Visualizing the ODEF

The ODEF content is available for visualization on a map using the Linkable Open Data Environment Viewer.