In recent years, Open Data policies and movements continues to spread worldwide. This paper introduces the debates about the definitions of open data (especially the "Government of Japan Standard Terms and Conditions"), and latest policy trends of international organizations, Japanese governments and local governments. Some use cases of businesses and civil society organizations are also introduced. Finally, this paper argues social and cultural meaning of the power of "open culture", and also discusses its relations with open data.

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Open data is a framework of information disclosure which have legal and technical reusability of data. In the domain of scholarly communication, libraries, academic societies and digital archives have worked to unlock their own asset to the public. This paper introduces the cases of scholarly open data and discuss an issue for licensing of conventional databases.

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Since the mid-2000s, Open Data has been proactively addressed worldwide, especially in Europe and United States. After illustrating the reason why public license is a good match for Open Data, this article shortly tracks back the history of Open Data and license design with a description of Creative Commons (CC) License and Database Rights. This article further points out that this issue is now in a situation of importance upon the release of CC 4.0, and presents future prospects and problems of Open Data and license design in the "CC 4.0 Era".

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The article presents problems to be addressed in digitization of historical documents and their open data service by generalizing experiences in several actual cases. After characterizing "historical documents" in broad sense, specific problems in individual steps of digitization (selection of documents to be processed, organization of documents and metadata assignment, preparation of digital data, and public release) are discussed. In addition, comments are made on feedbacks after release and their utilization. Final remarks are concerned with the solution of problems associated with digitization.

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Results of statistical surveys conducted by the government have, in principle, been disclosed for free use, or as open data, although with some unclearness in the conditions of use. While the Portal Site of Official Statistics of Japan (e-Stat), a one-stop service for government statistics, has enhanced the utility of survey data, the National Statistics Center is further promoting the functionality of the site, including the application programing interface (API). The present article presents an overview of the government's approach to the open data issue.

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Although the academic usage of open data has been widely discussed these days, it is still not clear how open data can contribute to humanistic studies, where structured data are hardly used. In contrast with the existing practice of digitization of humanistic resources, the author will point out that making the humanistic research materials available as open data can (1) diversify the use of research materials, (2) promotes the reuse of research results, and (3) optimize the information search utilizing linked data technologies. The author will also briefly review the major projects of open humanities resources, domestic or international, and several challenges that can potentially hinder the diffusion of open data in the field of humanistic studies in Japan.

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Web API for Full-text Database System for the Minutes of the Diet was launched on December, 2014. This study describes the development background of this API and reports the trends in use by analyzing the Web server logs up to June, 2015. The result shows; 1. The number of access is still small, 2. Many of the users are short-time users and tend to designate the time period rather than any search terms. We can conjecture that the API has been often utilized for the purpose of collecting some specific dataset. Finally, we set a future vision by suggesting the possible applications of the API to a corpus of Japanese or to the metrical study on Diet deliberations.

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