The Environmental Protection Administration's (EPA) cloud project to monitor environmental information is very important to Taiwan's conservation and sustainable development efforts, and its applications should be actively promoted and expanded, Premier Jiang Yi-huah said at a Cabinet meeting today.
The premier made the remarks after being briefed by the EPA on its implementation of the service, dubbed the "environmental cloud." Premier Jiang said data on the air, water, forests, the earth and ecosystems are all interrelated, and hence it is important to have precise readings and analyses of the information.
In the past, surveys and applications of environmental data were handled by different agencies, making it difficult to integrate, share and use the data, Jiang said. He applauded the EPA for inviting other agencies to jointly integrate the information now, which will prove helpful when the EPA is upgraded into the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources later on.
The government has always supported information transparency, Jiang emphasized, and it is also the government's hope that by offering information, citizens can better understand the nation's public policies and affairs. He requested all ministries to present the data in an accurate manner so that the public can have a proper understanding. The ministries should also cooperate with the private sector to put the information to other beneficial uses, and when preparing reports or promotional materials, they should explain technical terms in a way that the general reader can comprehend, Jiang suggested.
The environmental cloud project is being implemented from 2013 to 2016 as part of the Executive Yuan's larger plan for developing the cloud computing industry. By establishing information exchange systems, open platforms and resource databanks, the EPA hopes to capture environmental data more precisely, create value, develop useful applications, and connect with a disaster mitigation cloud. The environmental cloud currently contains 165 data sets and manages 640,000 records on pollution sources; over 1.3 million records have been exchanged so far. More than 80 percent of users were satisfied with the open data platform services, and more than 100,000 records have been downloaded.