Asia launches first official open data portal at Open Data Day 2021

The Taipei Computer Association (TCA) as the current Asia Open Data Partnership (AODP) secretariat has launched Asia’s first official open data portal, in conjunction with a data application workshop organised by AODP at Open Data Day 2021.

The launch and workshop was live-streamed on the DataEconomy.Taiwan YouTube channel, featuring talks from AODP representatives in Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, India, Thailand and Cambodia.

Asia Open Data Portal offers a single point of access to open data, published by institutions, agencies and organisations in a growing number of Asian member states, signalling a new era of data democratisation across Asia.

The portal currently features over 73.1 thousand datasets, organised into 20 catalogues and 12 categories, which can help to solve problems such as pollution in cities and the sourcing of PPE.

In a statement on 11 March, TCA said data is collected from a growing number of AODP member states, including South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and India.

The project faces some challenges, which includes the diversity of Asian languages and data formats used by the different states’ public and private sectors, which AODP is overcoming with the use of machine translation and diplomatic efforts toward data standardisation.

AODP was established in 2015 with the primary aim of facilitating communication and cooperation on open data and data application between Asian countries.

Initiated by the Organization for Data-driven Application (Taiwan) in 2017, AODP is modelled on the EU Open Data Portal, and officially approved by the AODP member states in 2019.

Its aim is to bolster Asia’s industrial development across all sectors and emerging technologies, such as AI and IoT.