The primary mission of the National Diet Library (NDL), which was established by the National Diet Library Law, is to assist in the activities of Diet Members by providing appropriate analysis and information. This article provides an overview of the work and organization of the Research and Legislative Reference Bureau, which has a major role in services for the Diet. Details of two main services, Research at Diet Members' Request and Anticipatory Research, are described below. This article also introduces some practical activities which make research services more effective as well as training courses in the Research and Legislative Reference Bureau and cooperative activities with outside organizations.

Many multilateral challenges to encourage research data sharing over domestic barriers are ongoing with the various approaches such as consensus building among research communities or decision making support for agencies. Particularly, policy-practice gap, which is caused by the separation between the intention of policy-makers and the expectation of researchers, is considered as an important issue. Accordingly, some international projects often conduct several data sharing surveys in order to reveal the gap. In Japan, open science discussions began in 2015 mainly with the top-down approach led by Cabinet Office. However, there is no survey which focuses on the bottom-up reality in Japanese research community yet. Therefore, we planned a data sharing survey targeting for Japanese researchers in earth environmental information domain. The result is helpful to understand the current situation of research data sharing in Japan.

Though the quantity of digital information in the cyber space is explosively expanding, the real-world is still defined as physical and the information we can acquire or view is limited. In the meantime, AR (Augmented Reality), is attracting the most attention as an enhanced view technology of a physical environment combined with ICT which adds various digital information as visualized/identified image onto the surface of our real-world. It is an aggregation of various highly advanced element technologies, so its innovation would derive from an evolution of those each elements. We involve here the brief explanation of how AR works as well as discuss the potential applied markets of AR, the future possibility of it and the issues to be solved.

Todayʼs consumers are spoiled by affluent choices of products and services that are being offered with very competitive prices. More importantly, they can easily and quickly search and compare various options before making their purchase decisions. As a result, consumers have more bargaining power than before, which makes it very challenging for many companies to differentiate themselves from other brands by traditional competitive factors such as prices, functions and/or performances. Then, in order to meet higher expectations from consumers, companies must be able to provide very good User Experience (UX); otherwise, they will lose their customers to competition. This is why UX becomes one of the key brand differentiators at many companies today.

One of an important objectives of Mie University is to support the region of the next generation for developing to combine the functions of the primary sector, secondary sector, and tertiary sector into a "sixth sector." The project of "Marine Food Innovation Creation Unit Construction" will be carried out including the education and the research concerning the "Remote Guideware" having augmented reality technology, "Safe Aquacultural Technology" and "Food Safety and Security", This paper summarizes the present status and future perspective of this project focusing on ICT-related activity.