Open Data Movement in China

7.4 Open Data Movement in China

The Open Data Community is currently working on three projects, one of which is a comprehensive timeline of open data in China where OFKN China has potentially traced the open data "movement" to its beginnings.According to the timeline, the Chinese government's first open data website was Shanghai's Internal Data Directory launched sometime around September 2011, though the date is not clear. The government does little to publicize the launch of these sites. The current data list includes 425 data sets. The Shanghai government later released some data on the Shanghai data portal (see Figure 7.4.1), launched in December 2012. Beijing's open data site went online in October 2012 with 4,000 datasets to date, followed by that of the National Bureau of Statistics site in September 2013.

Several months later, China held its first ever hackathon using public data called Code for Climate Change. The creator of a hackerspace called Xindanwei, meaning 'new work unit,' which is a play on the government work units. This is the first time that the government is providing all this data to the start-up and creative community and is working together with them by providing data sets. Also, top researchers from all over China are providing insights and knowledge.



Figure 7.4.1 – The timeline provides the history of open data in China


Figure 7.4.2 – The color-coded to show open data's availability in China

Before you can begin to use data, you have to know what's available. So another ongoing project of the Open Data Community is a graded survey of all available data in major Chinese citiesbased on a number of categories such as urban public transportation, air quality, census, health, and economic indicators, among others. As of now, of the two cities that have been graded, about 50 percent of their datasets are open (see Figure 7.4.2), meaning they are machine-readable. Still, the Open Data Community hopes that after making a coordinated effort to clean up the data, it will encourage civil society to use it and that the Open Data Community can serve as an incubator for data apps and projects⁶³.

In the last decade, a few pioneers in library and information institution have introduced the idea and principles of Semantic Web and Linked Data technology into practice. Some researchers in National Library of China, Institute of Scientific and Technological Information of China and Shanghai Library have done several experimental projects to implement Linked Data. However, there is no practical system that can provide online services by the end of 2014.

Shanghai Library has initiated a project that aimed to establish a genealogy system based on Linked data architecture and the related semantic technologies. There are substantial genealogy materials collected by Shanghai Library. Genealogy contains rich information about families and local history, such as the ancestors, notable people, events, family members migration information,etc. Shanghai Library has the biggest Genealogy collection in China. However, the database is based on MARC format, which is the standard bibliography format for Library resources in the last six decades. It should be transformed into a RDF-enabled format so as to applied to the up-to-date semantic technology.

With the development of Digital Humanity and Semantic Web, the old database based on MARC related technologies are outdated for its obsolete data model. It cannot deeply reveal the properties of the content of genealogy resources, and also cannot encode the relationship among the entities (People, Places, Temporal, and Events etc.). The Linked Data technology is the feasible solution to resolve the problems. As the Lightweight solution of Semantic Web, Linked Data⁶⁴ is rooted in the exist basic technologies of Web. In Linked Data architecture, all resources are identified by URI, which act as not only the unique name of the resource on the web but the locator to access the resource as well. The information about the resource is encoded with RDF data model (sometimes can be normalized with OWL encoded ontologies to represent domain knowledge). Its serialization can be understood by machine and indicate the relationship among resources.

Shanghai Library has published a genealogy ontology based on BIBFRAME model and vocabulary. BIBFRAME was initiated by LOC and other Libraries as the next generation bibliography framework intended to replace MARC. It provides the possibility to bring the old-fashioned bibliographic data on the Semantic Web, as a Linked Data service. Currently, Shanghai Library has developed a practical data model with RDF, and start to map the genealogy data into RDF. Now a demo system is under construction. It aims to publish the authority controlled data and bibliography data as Linked Data, and to establish an exhibit layer to access and search the data by multiple facet such as people, place, time, etc. It will provide a SPARQL endpoint to facilitate querying triples. There is also provided a data visualization tool to display the relationship of the data Shanghai Library will keep on applying Semantic Web Technologies to build its digital humanity platform. The Genealogy Linked Data System acts as a demonstrative solution to recognize the traditional library can fit into Semantic Web with its rich, treasured and sophisticated resources.