The Advancement of Open Data

 In the policy room, my work involving big data was comprised of increasing the amount of data and raising awareness of big data in society. This brings us to Open Data. Starting at the federal and local government level, public data must be released for use by citizens such that it might lead to the creation of new services. I took part in the “Consortium on the Promotion and Distribution of Open Data” as Director and chairman of utilization and dissemination. The event was attended by relevant government ministries and agencies, local government leaders, industry, and research facilities with the goal of information dissemination and case development.

 There were three points for the consortium to accomplish.

 First let’s talk about the positive side. The first matter was to create a business model. The incentive for releasing and sharing public data is basically good faith. We wanted to create an avenue for business to profit from it. To create sustainability, we would have to create a model for making profits.

  Next, we needed to reduce the negative aspects. We had to foster a sense of security. The more data becomes open, the less anxiety and resistance there is to it. We wanted to draw a clear line between open and closed data with clearly outlined privacy policies.

 Thirdly, we needed the continued cooperation of industry, government and academia. The government must do more than just output data; they must output money as well. We expect them to contribute capital towards the creation of uses for the data, until such activity is taken over by citizens. This should be seen as infrastructure investment rather an industry support measure.

 According to the consortium, government data should be free from copyright. I want to make this a reality as rapidly as possible. I’m thinking of an approach in which the government could release data using a second generation approach like the “Creative Commons” license.

 To be honest, when I started this work I had every intention of forcing the release of public data, but after working on it I realized that the matter of opening up public data was a trivial one. The real challenge would be to have the massive amounts of private and corporate data released and used as open data. It became clear that “everyone’s data” must have a public nature.

  I greatly respect the cooperation of the participants. The Japanese government: Cabinet; General affairs; Education; Health, Labor, and Welfare; Agricultural; Economy, Trade, and Industry; Diplomatic relations; and Financial, many of whom did not get along, all came to the same table to work out a plan together. Surprisingly, they have plunged forward in the direction of data openness. Even though open data doesn’t offer a direct return, people from federal and local governments, industry, and the private sector have all participated willfully in sweating out the details.

  There’s nothing to do but compliment their efforts. There’s an event every year that awards the excellent efforts of consortium members. I want to continue to continue to support those efforts.