"The government's open data policy has garnered international affirmation," Premier Mao Chi-kuo emphasized at the Cabinet meeting today after a National Development Council (NDC) briefing on the concrete results of the government's open data.
In the Open Knowledge Foundation's preliminary rankings posted on its website, Taiwan ranked 36th in 2013, improved to 11th in 2014 and is expected to be among the top countries this year, Mao remarked.
The premier reiterated that open data for value-added applications is an important strategy in public governance, innovative services and overall economic development; it is also a means to lay a good foundation for ide@ Taiwan 2020. He enjoined various ministries to continue with the policy and to proactively engage local governments in the program so as to enlarge the scale of open data, create a reliable open-data environment, stimulate the private sector's innovation and dynamism, and develop businesses for data management and applications to generate economic momentum.
In addition, Mao tasked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to study the incorporation of open government data into the upcoming APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) initiative next year and to strive for the establishment of an "Asian Open Data Alliance" under the APEC framework with Taiwan serving as its first-term chair. The premier hopes Taiwan will become an exemplar in open government data.
The NDC stated that the Open Knowledge Foundation is a non-profit organization established in 2004 in the United Kingdom. The foundation has since 2013 conducted appraisals of various nations' open data based on the data's quality, categories and degree of openness. For the 2015 rankings, the foundation has evaluated 149 countries and areas worldwide based on 13 indices. Taiwan has risen in the overall rankings every year, the NDC noted.