If I remember correctly, I wrote such a post several years ago. I wanted to say that it is not important to keep just grief for our future. I believe only data can contribute improvement our life in future, emotion can be a support for keeping that action though. The belief is not changed yet today.
Today, 5 years has passed from the disaster that most Japanese people starts to forget. There are something that changes and the other has not changed yet. It is only harmful to remember that event just as past memories. The lifetime of people who was remained should not be used for just the grief of remembering past event. We have to make a progress for the reconstruction of our country. It must take a lot of time and must need a lot of people work to achieve better place for our living. Instead of remembering just grief, what should we do to make a progress? So this was what I want to say in the past post. We should keep data. We should make use of data for our future.
By using data, we can make a decision calmly and convey a knowledge to our new generations.
- We can decide which levee can operates successfully.
- We can see how current rural area actually be.
- We can use limited money effectively.
Nowadays we can access various kind of data about our society. They are called Opendata. This is a type of movement mainly emerged from US. Thanks to the movement, our national government and regional governments provide their data in accessible format. For example data.go.jp aims to achieve improvement of our life, wealth and welfare by providing public data.
But we cannot say all people cannot use these data. They are written various type of format such as xsl,csv or PDF etc though we can see it or download it. We, who are used to the digital format data, have to convert these data into readable format for a lot of people as much as possible. It is very important to make them visible for all people.
So I have started my tiny project to make these data visible, Open Data Showcase. They are not limited to the information about earthquake disaster. I’ll keep making various kinds of data about our country visible. Because regardless of earthquake disaster our country keep declining. The number of people who are living this country is decreasing. The size of economy is shrinking. Above all, people becomes unhappy more and more. March 11th is just a trigger to consider our future. What we have to consider must not be limited to the earthquake disaster. If we cannot take an effective policy or action, we cannot only recover from the disaster but also our homeland won’t be rise again. In addition, we have very limited resource in terms of money, people and time. We cannot do all things needed to be done. We have to choose what we should do taking some kind of risk.
Opendata showcase currently made 4 dataset visible. Japanese population growth, Japanese educational background, Fukushima population growth and Fukushima moving out people. There is no reason to choose these datasets as initial ones. I’ll add more information and increase the collection of showcase. In addition, I want to extract some values or insight from these information by using machine learning or software engineering. That’s what I can do for our future.
Last but not least, I want to say thank you to governments that provides an access to huge volume statistical data we cannot access otherwise.