| James Kon |
BRUNEI Darussalam is looking at building its own data centre – dubbed the ‘National Centralised Data Base (NCDB)’ – for government use, with its implementation scheduled to start in the second quarter of the year.
The data centre project was revealed by Minister at the Prime Minister’s Office Yang Berhormat Dato Seri Setia Haji Awang Abdul Mokti bin Haji Mohd Daud. He made these comment in his reply to member of the Legislative Council (LegCo) Yang Berhormat Siti Rozaimeriyanty binti Dato Seri Laila Jasa Haji Abdul Rahman’s question on databases yesterday morning during the third day of the 15th LegCo session.
Yang Berhormat Siti Rozaimeriyanty asked whether the relevant authorities have carried out plans to make data.government.bn more efficient or whether there will be a new database centre serving as one-stop platform containing all the needed important information.
“data.government.bn is a portal aimed at sharing government data that is classified as public data which do not contain any sensitive information, including statistics and aggregated data that can be accessed and downloaded by the public for free online,” Yang Berhormat Dato Seri Setia Haji Awang Abdul Mokti added. “The portal enables the sharing of open data more widely to raise transparency in the government services.”
Government agencies in the country are encouraged to share their non-sensitive data with the public, with the responsibility of holding such data lying with the respective government agencies.
“In an effort to ensure the information on the portal is frequently updated,” the minister said, “the E-Government National Centre (EGNC) as the coordinating agency will continuously hold discussions with data owners and send reminder emails for the data to be updated and for additional data to be uploaded to increase the amount of accessible data on the portal.”
The NCDB initiative, he said, will be implemented by the EGNC.
The project is in the tendering stage, with the advertisement for the project being published last year.
The minister added that the project scope covers the building of the infrastructure of the database for use by information technology (IT) projects under the 11th National Development Plan.
“This is to allow for better integration of information among government agencies,” the minister said. “The NCDB will introduce a new service called ‘Data base is a service’ aimed at reducing government expenditure in preparing databases for IT projects under the 11th National Development Plan.
“It will provide convenience to all the government agencies by allowing them to keep their data at the centre. In addition, the project also has the scope of functioning as a national information hub, playing a role (as a repository) for common data such as names, address and phone numbers. An Application Programming Interface (API) system will be used for this database project.”