At the Cabinet’s weekly meeting Thursday, Premier Su Tseng-chang received a National Development Council briefing on the benefits of smart government data management. The premier said the council’s work to promote the Open Data initiative and the My Data platform is helping to create a data economy and a public-private model of cooperative governance. These are key strategies for expediting Taiwan’s digital transformation and implementing smart governance, and will improve administrative efficiency and government services.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, public and private resources were used to develop real-time maps of face mask availability. Such successful undertakings were only possible thanks to the availability of open data, the sharing of information, and talented private citizens who developed useful application programming interfaces. The premier said these are prime examples of how open data can be applied in new and different ways to turn static data into useful assets for the nation and the people. This type of cooperative model between the government and the private sector has also attracted interest from nations such as Japan and South Korea.

Taiwan’s government has already released 47,000 sets of open data, over 80 percent of which are available in a machine-readable, structured and open format. These datasets have been downloaded more than 15 million times. Taiwan also ranked first among 94 countries surveyed in a recent report on open data around the world. Such affirmation by the international community is a clear indication of the strength of Taiwan’s soft power, the premier said.