China's 14th Five-Year Plan involves expanding the orderly opening up of basic public information and data, and constructing national open platforms for unified data sharing.
How to connect isolated data islands and break down information silos, to make big data more valuable?
Yang Fan, a deputy to the National People's Congress, member of the Leading Party Members’ Group and the deputy director of the Chongqing Big Data Application and Development Administration.
"Promotion of data collection, sharing, and innovative utilization has been baffled by how can national ministries and commissions better break the limits of vertical management systems and support the integration with the regional data sharing mechanism," said Yang Fan, a deputy to the National People's Congress, member of the Leading Party Members’ Group and the deputy director of the Chongqing Big Data Application and Development Administration. She suggested catalyzing the building of national integrated data-related systems and mechanisms, connecting isolated data islands at all levels and between all departments, and stimulating data sharing, integrated utilization, circulation and trade.
Make data more valuable
"The value of big data lies in its application. After data sharing is allowed, the most valuable data can be pooled together," said Yang.
"At the end of 2020, the 17th meeting of the Central Committee for Deepening Overall Reform reviewed and adopted the opinions on establishing and improving government data sharing and coordination mechanism and accelerating the promotion of orderly data sharing. This is good news." Yang said that Chongqing paid great attention to the data pooling, sharing, and innovative utilization, comprehensively implementing the "cloud chief system" and sparing no effort to drive "management of cloud platforms, data, and application".
Last year, the city put the Urban Big Data Resource Center into use, which covers the sharing system at state, municipal, and district or county levels. It kicked off the sharing of government data, the opening of public data, and sharing of data between Sichuan and Chongqing. Compared to the time since the implementation of the "cloud chief system", the number of sharing data utilization rises by 170%.
"Later, Chongqing will actively put into practice the guiding principles of the opinions and study to issue and carry out a corresponding action plan, to better serve the data sharing between the country, the municipality, and districts."
National integrated data center
Thanks to the attempts of Chongqing, "setting up national hub nodes of the big data center in Chengdu, Chongqing, and other key areas" has been incorporated in the opinions.
"Construction of the hub node of the National Integrated Big Data Center (Chengdu-Chongqing) is a great opportunity to power the development of big data application in the two cities." According to Yang, Chongqing is endeavoring to develop data center clusters, and planning to have at least 40,000 server racks and 500,000 servers in 2021. With China-Singapore (Chongqing) Dedicated Connectivity Channel as the bond, the city will promote the construction of such key projects as China-Singapore International Supercomputing Center and China Mobile's general platform for edge computing, speed up the establishment of an ecosystem for advanced computing industries, and effectively improve the city's capability to provide supercomputing services.
Meanwhile, Chongqing is expected to enhance the top-level design, release plans and develop smart city construction. Chongqing has been selected as the 2020 China Leading Smart City. It will put the new-type smart city operating management center into use and build the world's largest electric security fence for motor vehicles that covers the entire city.
"All of these have laid a solid foundation for undertaking the hub node of the National Integrated Big Data Center." Yang believed that supporting the Chengdu-Chongqing region to participate in the construction of the National Integrated Big Data Center will facilitate the upgrading of cross-region integrated application of data, intensiveness of data center, and coordinated scheduling capability of computing power.