The difficulty of commending open data

The Commendation Awards for the Voluntary Publishing of Open Data have been held. I was on the executive committee. This is the 4^th year running for the event.

The event was hosted by Vitalizing Local Economy Organization by Open Data & Big Data (VLED).

- Grand Prize

Toyota InfoTechnology Center, Shizuoka City

Their entry was a joint project to create a new service by combining the data from Shizumichi Info, a road traffic control information system, with Toyota InfoTechnology Center’s automobile status data.

- Excellence Prize

National Strategy Office of Information and Communication Technology, Cabinet Secretariat

They removed the line forbidding “usage that violates laws and ordinances, regulations, or public policy” from the Government of Japan Standard Terms of Use.

- Excellence Prize

Geospatial Information Authority of Japan

Geospatial Information Authority of Japan provides open data and information on GitHub.

- Wide Range Data Prize

Fukui prefecture and 17 Fukui cities

The data of Fukui prefecture and 17 of the prefecture’s cities were combined into a single file and made public as “Public Resource Information,” “Garbage Collection Day Information,” “Garbage Separation Information,” “Evacuation Shelter Information” lists.

- CiP Conference Prize

WELMO Inc.

They aggregated the data of services such as nursing, making them manageable via PC, tablet, or cloud services. By their cooperation with municipalities and the governments, this open data allows citizens to chose the right social welfare services for them.

- New Media Risk Association Prize

Asahi Shimbun

They gathered, stored, and totalized the information gathered for articles and made the data public in CSV file form.

- You Go Lab Prize

KDDI Corporation

They develop and sell B2C IoT products. Their service involves linking common objects such as umbrella stands and garbage bins with smartphones to inform their users about things such as umbrella presence and garbage collection.

The Grand Prize went to Sabae, Fukui in year 1, a community group in year 2, and a public interest company called Tokyo Metro in year 3. This year, the Grand Prize was awarded to a municipality and corporation working together. I believe that the spread of open data is growing larger each year. This year, we had two winners for the Excellence Prize. Japan is working hard at adopting open data.