Innovation Nippon the 3rd Symposium 2013
Open Data and Innovation (2)Date and Time: December 20, 2013 17:00-19:00
Venue: GLOCOM(Harks Roppongi Bldg. 2nd floor, 6-15-21 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo)
Panelists: Taro Suzuki, Member of Yokohama City Council/the Liberal
Democrats
Yuriko Inoue, Professor of Graduate School of International Corporate
Strategy of Hitotsubashi University
Yasukatsu Ikeda, Senior staff, Department of Commerce, Industryand Labor New Industries Development Division,
Aomori Prefectural Government
Moderator: Tomoaki Watanabe, Executive Research Fellow of GLOCOM
Co-founder of Open Knowledge Foundation Japan
Executive Director of CommonsphereAs the launch of trial version of the government’s open data catalogue isapproaching, the importance of sharing practical know-how on open data has
been increasing. Discussions were made on how should we set copyright,
licensing, or terms of use to successfully maximize the offering and use of data,taking some examples of advanced initiatives that have already been
implemented by municipal governments and ministries in Japan.
Taro Suzuki, a member of Yokohama City Council, introduced the city’s
initiative on open data. The characteristic of Yokohama City is that the privatesector is taking the initiative regarding open data. Previously, some departmentsof the governmental administration randomly supported the activities of theprivate sector, however, from this fiscal year, since Mr. Suzuki has beenappointed as a chairman of the council that administers those departments, aclarification of the promotion system has been proposed. Mr. Suzuki said it wasimportant to hammer out an announcement of the effect from the position of thecouncil to play a role of as a local council in promoting the utilization of opendata.

At the end, Mr. Suzuki emphasized that the significance of open data
promotion in municipal government lies in the way to activate the economy andto transform the way of doing business in administration as well as the contents,
as already mentioned in the “Electronic Administration Open Data Strategy”
issued by the Japanese government.
Yasuyoshi Ikeda, an official of the Aomori Prefectural Government
introduced the “Aomori Video Contents Promotion” and the “Sightseeing Cloud”
as its initiatives for open data. The former is an approach to promote Aomori
Prefecture effectively through management, storing, and opening the footage
taken by staff of Aomori Prefectural Government, copyright retained by theprefecture, and making them extensively available to citizens. The latter is adatabase for referencing open data. It was created when renewing thesightseeing website by summarizing municipal governments’ sightseeing
information. These two approaches were not the results of officers trying topromote open data so much as a consequence of what they did being theutilization of open data. At the end, Mr. Ikeda introduced the approach that is
ongoing in the prefectural government.
Yuriko Inoue, a Professor of Hitotsubashi University, explained various
problems in the secondary use of public data. Those include copyright problems
with public data, dealing with third party information, and national or municipal
governments’ responsibilities regarding dealing with the problems of secondaryuse. Based on this, she introduced her opinion on approaches to the opening upof public data in Japan. As for public data already opened on websites, etc., shesaid the license which permits extensive secondary use such as Creative
Commons’ CC-BY should be the default approach. Public data include some
information that are not open now but have high utility. As for sensitive
information within that data, they should be opened, but with more restricted
terms of use or license. However, to avoid excessive restrictions by theadministrative side, such terms of use with strong restrictions should be limited
to information that has concrete and clear reasons necessitating such
restrictions, professor Inoue added.
In the panel discussion, discussions on the challenges involved inpromoting the utilization of open data were also made among participants in thesymposium and they were summarized.