Big data not only facilitates people’s daily life, but also improves the governance capabilities of the government. Located at the high-tech zone in Guiyang, China’s first national big data laboratory, the National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Application on Improving Government Governance Capabilities, is dedicated to promoting the regional modernization of social governance through efficient application of government data.

In an interview, Li Xiang, the general manager of the project department of the laboratory, introduced the “Intelligent Cloud” platform which covers 12 scenarios including government affairs, people’s livelihood, education, transportation, pipe network, ecology and so on. Li said, “It is a platform for our laboratory to integrate data resources across areas to improve the effectiveness of government governance.” Privacy and data protection are the core competitiveness of the laboratory. Li added, “The government had numerous data and we calculate the results through encryption computation and promote the transformation of big data on condition of ensuring the security and privacy of the massive data controlled by the government to meet the demands of the government. Moreover, the government lacked algorithms and calculating capacity, so the laboratory provided and supported the data application for improving the governance efficiency.”

The lab has made 46 critical technological achievements such as collection and fusion of multi-source heterogeneous data, desensitization and protection of government data, developed more than 10 application systems such as intelligent analysis of public security big data and intelligent inspection and supervision, and built a standard system in big data application for improving governance capabilities.

Based on the big data collected from Guiyang, Nanjing, Xinjiang, Shenzhen and Chengdu, the lab developed a national integrated application in livelihood with local characteristics. It mainly focuses on passengers’ flow, transportation and social security, and presents all aspects of social life in a panoramic manner on time and space. Meanwhile, it contains real-time and historical analyses, making full use of data fusion.

Situational awareness system for cyberspace risk leverages data to visualize the state quo of cyberspace risks in China and provides the government with a basis for decision-making regarding cyberspace governance. In 2018, the laboratory released the Research Report on Cyberspace Security Risk Index, which comprehensively assessed and ranked the security risk of 31 provincial administrative regions and 32 major cities.

The intelligent inspection and supervision system developed by the laboratory applies three management mechanisms, with unified coding, three-colors warning mechanism and data sharing, to realize the full life cycle management of public security tasks. In this way, responsibilities of all the personnel are clearly defined, and the processes of tasks can be tracked in real time, effectively supporting data-driven office. While separating powers and responsibilities, this system improves the execution of departmental work.