Two Executive Committee members of TRON Forum, Microsoft Japan Co., Ltd. (Microsoft Japan) and YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory (YRP UNL) announced with the City of Sapporo at the joint press conference on January 19, 2016 that they will provide “kokosil Sapporo” to the visitors to “Sapporo Snow Festival” and “FIS Ski Jumping World Cup 2016.” This provision will be conducted as part of “The Contract of the Demonstration Experiment for Constructing Open Data City,” one of Open data & big data promotion project for FY2015 of Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. In light of Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games and other sports games, the Contract aims to build a model case where social issues related to the improvement of the environment to receive inbound tourists are solved by information communication services that utilize open data, so that foreign visitors to Japan can be entertained with “Omotenashi” (hospitality) that utilizes leading-edge ICT. Microsoft Japan and YRP UNL have been developing apps that use open data by utilizing “Microsoft Azure” (Cloud platform) as open data distribution infrastructure, “Microsoft Translator” as an automatic translation service and “kokosil” of YRP UNL as a service to provide high accuracy location information provision system. For details on the announcement, please see the following websites.

■Microsoft Japan Co., Ltd.
http://news.microsoft.com/ja-jp/

■YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory
http://www.ubin.jp/press/pdf/UNL160119-01.pdf