ANNAI presents the Kyoto Open Data Portal

ANNAI Co., Ltd. (head office: Kamigyo-ku, Kyoto Prefecture, Keiichi Ward, CEO: Satoshi Kino) specializing in web development and Drupal consulting, have released the Kyoto Open Data portal. The portal automatically generates 5-star open data. The Kyoto Open Data portal is the world’s first open data portal site utilizing this technology.

京都市オープンデータポータルサイト

What is open data?


Open Data is a means of providing access to government data. This data is mainly used for solving social issues and for stimulating the economy. In December 2016, the Japanese government passed a bill requiring the utilization of Open Data across Japan, which has led to a steadily growing community.

Local government data quality

Open data is ranked according to a 5-star system. The 5-star level is named LOD (Linked Open Data). Until recently, Japanese government primarily provided data in PDF or Excel files. This format made the data difficult to utilize easily in many forms.

 

localgovdata

 

 

How to solve this issue

This is a difficult issue to solve for local governments, as it is a technical and time consuming process. ANNAI has set up the Kyoto Open Data portal to allow officials to enter data into the system, and have it automatically available as LOD data. This is the first ever implementation of a LOD delivery website, and ANNAI hopes to use their system with other local governments in the future.

 

 

How the system works

Administrators upload PDF or Exel files to the system. The data is turned into RDF friendly web pages, with LOD compatible URLs. SPARQL servers automatically pull the RDF data from the web pages, creating a REST API that can be used to retrieve the data. This means that the data is available in a human friendly form on the webpages, and shared on the webthrough the REST API.

 

Roadmap

In this project, we produced many features, such as API implementation, batch data registration, and the SPARQL endpoints. These functions add to the innovation of Open Data transfer protocols. We would like to support more and more government /local government and organization to support open data innovation. DKAN is such a reliable platform in terms of flexible authority settings, full-text search on the site, flexible design, function scalability and so on. Both the website’s management and users will be happy with DKAN.