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Before the flood season this year, on June 6, the director of the risk reduction center of the Nanjing branch of the Chinese People’s Insurance Company purchased a government data product for 10,000 yuan on the platform of the Nanjing Public Resources Trading Center – water situation spatial data (Nanjing Drum Tower) in the main urban area of the provincial capital. “With this data in hand, we have a direction when designing and promoting water damage compensation products.” He said.
This is the first government data authorized operation product in Nanjing to complete on-site registration and shelves, achieving a breakthrough in the on-site registration of government data elements in Nanjing from “0 to 1”.
How is government data traded?
how to exert its social value,
And at the same time bring a certain amount of income?
how to ensure the security of personal information,
Further unlock the data dividend?
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How government data becomes a product
The government data product is a form containing 1,593 entries and only a few hundred kilobytes, recording all complaints related to flooding in residential areas and municipal roads in the 12345 government hotline in Gulou District, Nanjing from 2019 to 2021.
The Gulou District Data Bureau is the original data provider for this product. “Water damage compensation products are directly aimed at the public, and public complaints can most intuitively reflect the annual flooding situation, which is of the greatest reference value to insurance companies.” The relevant person in charge said.
It’s not difficult to export raw data in bulk after filtering categories. However, from huge and redundant raw data to data products, processing is a necessary link. The relevant person in charge of the Gulou Hi-Tech Group, a state-owned enterprise entrusted by the bureau to process, said that the original data just obtained was a table, with many entries and miscellaneous information, especially the record of the content of the call was too colloquial and lacked logic. “Deleting invalid entries, summarizing valid entries, and sorting out and summarizing text content are the first ‘cleaning’ hurdles for data.”
“Desensitization”, that is, the deformation of sensitive information, is another key link in processing, which is used to protect the privacy of citizens in government data. The raw data contains the names (surnames), telephone numbers, and some of the complainants’ home addresses are specific to the house number, which is the key information to be removed. The “desensitized” data only retains key information such as time, location, flooding period, and flooding degree, in which the description of the location is only accurate to the name of the community, and the flooding degree is uniformly expressed as “mild, moderate, and severe”.
Such a product is enough to help the buyer a lot. Recently, during the day, he and his colleagues made a flood map of Gulou District based on these data, which communities and road sections are prone to flooding, and what the degree of flooding is, will be presented on the map at a glance.
He said that the comprehensiveness and accuracy of government data are difficult for enterprises to achieve by simply doing market research, and the guiding significance for risk identification, customer selection, and product pricing is also the most prominent. In the past, enterprises could only obtain a rough portrait of the claims records in the area where the existing business was generated, but they often did not have a clue when expanding new customers. “With this set of data, we can also install IoT monitoring equipment and formulate disaster relief plans in a more targeted manner.” He admits that the value of this data product will be tested after the flood season is over.
“After removing the cost of desensitization, compliance review, developer man-hours and tax payment, the net income of the whole product is about 3,000 yuan.” According to reports, they plan to use the relevant proceeds to build a data element industrial park and gather a group of data service providers in order to generate greater social value.
How data products are traded
Like items in a store, data products need to be “on-site” and put on the shelves. The data trading platform section of the Nanjing public resources trading platform is the “shelf”, and before it is put on the shelf, the data products have to go through the last review.
The relevant person in charge of the Nanjing Public Resources Trading Center revealed that there is a list of elements for the compliance review of data transactions, mainly including four aspects: subject compliance requirements, data security management and technical protection capabilities, legal requirements for data sources, and tradability of data products, which are usually reviewed by third-party professional service institutions such as accounting firms and law firms.
The focus of the review is on the data authorization operation and consignment processing agreement, the description of the processing process of the data product, and the product sample is also subject to sampling. “Whether it involves personal privacy, personal information, trade secrets, confidential business information and other data, whether it involves third-party copyrights, trademark rights and other intellectual property rights or other legitimate rights and interests, is what we focus on in the review.” Gao Feng, partner of Grandall Law Firm (Nanjing), introduced.
All products listed on the shelves will receive a coded data product registration certificate. On the Nanjing public resources trading platform, 62 data products have been put on the shelves and have been traded 21 times.
There are various types of products on the shelves, distributed in cultural tourism, business and trade, financial services, enterprise science and technology innovation and other fields. The main development entities include private enterprises, communication operators, transportation groups and other state-owned enterprises. The map of business entities, real-time operation of public transportation, and smart parking spaces are among the representative government data products.
Among the traded products, they are delivered in the form of cloud delivery and offline delivery. Taking the “Water Spatial Data in the Main Urban Area of the Provincial Capital City (Nanjing Drum Tower)” as an example, after reaching the transaction intention, the Nanjing Branch of Chinese Insurance signed a purchase contract with Gulou Hi-Tech Group, and the payment was settled in the form of invoicing and remittance, and the data products were delivered in the form of encrypted compressed packages.
Shanghai’s data trading exploration is at the forefront of the country. Founded in 2021, the Shanghai Data Exchange has listed more than 1,000 data products with a high degree of marketization. Different from Shanghai’s “entry fee”, the fledgling Nanjing data trading platform is currently public welfare and open to all business entities.
According to the relevant person in charge of the Nanjing Public Resources Trading Center, considering that the review service fee of the third-party institution is high for some start-up data providers, the platform provides a pre-disclosure function, allowing some data products to be put on the shelves first, and then supplement the relevant procedures after the initial transaction intention is reached. Nanjing’s data trading market is still in the early stages of cultivation, and raising awareness and creating a development environment are the top priorities to attract more buyers and sellers to enter the market. At present, Nanjing’s public resources trading platform has attracted more than 400 entities, including 104 data vendors and 173 third-party professional institutions.
How to further unleash the data dividend
The water and electricity consumption of enterprises may be helpful to financial institutions in granting credit, and software companies engaged in smart cities want information about underground pipe networks in the region…… In the view of the relevant person in charge of the Gulou District Data Bureau, a considerable part of the public data held by government departments is of great use to business entities, but due to information asymmetry, business entities do not know the existence of data and cannot obtain it, and the value of government affairs data has been obliterated for a long time.
The “Opinions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council on Building a Data Basic System to Better Play the Role of Data Elements” issued at the end of 2022 proposes to “explore the conditional paid use of public data for industrial development and industry development”, which provides top-level support for the commercialization of government affairs data. Government data is an important part of public data.
The protection of personal privacy and public safety is a necessary prerequisite for the large-scale commercial use of government data. Chen Ying, a professor at the School of Engineering Management at Nanjing University and director of the Fintech Research and Development Center at Nanjing University, believes that the way of developing and utilizing government data is crucial. “If it penetrates directly to the level of citizens’ personal information, it involves the issue of privacy leakage. However, if we simply make good use of the group portrait function of government affairs data and use the analysis of group behavior to help business entities make decisions and economic and social operations, we can maximize the value and benefits of government affairs data. ”Taking into account security and practicability, it forces government data products to be continuously upgraded. “The water situation spatial data table of this transaction is only the primary form of the product.” The relevant person in charge of Gulou Hi-Tech Group said frankly that a higher level of processing lies in the establishment of data tools such as models and verifications, so as to amplify product benefits under the premise that “the original data is not out of the domain, and the data is available and invisible”.
“How can data be opened up for different government departments? What level is it open to? The top-level design should formulate rules and establish a reasonable, open, and orderly distribution system and mechanism, so as to dispel the concerns of various departments and further regulate the government affairs data market. Chen Ying suggested.
Gao Feng, a partner at Grandall Law Firm (Nanjing), also believes that it is necessary to form a unified system of rules for the authorization and operation of public data and a system of data property rights in the region as soon as possible, so as to effectively improve the circulation efficiency of data elements and avoid chaos in the process of authorization and operation.
Combined with the experience in actual operation, the relevant person in charge of the Gulou District Data Bureau further suggested that the top priority is to implement classified and hierarchical management of government affairs data, especially to break the data barriers between different departments, and to code the data with different articles but the same content in a unified manner, so as to facilitate batch management and utilization, and welcome all parties including state-owned enterprises and private enterprises to “enter” with confidence.
