A bird's-eye view of the central business district in Beijing. [Photo/VCG]

An index to be released by a research team from Peking University next month will, for the first time, create a digital image of city governments and build a database based on different government functions and responsibilities.

The team's 2019 China Government Index will be a data system based on observation and monitoring of the services of 278 city governments in areas including transparency, credibility, public resources and innovation capacity.

It will eventually cover 150 categories of information, with the first completed batch of around 50 to be released next month.

"This is not an evaluation system, but more like a medical report for municipal governments," said Yang Fengchun, dean of Peking University's E-government Institute. "It expands the government's presentation from simply a physical body and creates a digital image. It is like drawing a government portrait to see if it is beautiful or not."

The data will be available online for free on an official website and via WeChat and will also be released in printed form.

Giving one example of the range of data covered, Yang said the team had set up an urban bird chirping index that could reflect, through one straightforward figure, the livability and greenness of a city after the large-scale urbanization.

"There is no similar data system at present," he said.

Yang said many risks are cropping up as society undergoes rapid development. However, governments often take action after risks emerge and fail to do any pre-risk management.

The index data system would help them undertake pre-risk management through instant monitoring and optimize their behaviors by making it easier to plan the use of public resources rationally.

It could also help build smart governments by synchronizing with real government data and serve as the basis for future use of government service robots, he added.

To create the system, the research team collected data from the internet, publicly available government information and published industrial and academic research.

For the urban bird chirping index, Yang said team members had talked with official organizations such as the China Wildlife Conservation Association, but they failed to provide any usable data because the checkpoints they monitored were usually placed in wild areas instead of urban environments.

After further research, the research team found that such data could be gathered from nongovernment sources, including many civil groups and volunteers engaged in bird-watching. Yang said they were a "very good data source", but the bird chirping data was still being collected and wouldn't be included in the information released next month.

"This finding is very important. It means governments still need to do lots of work in opening government information and making access easy and convenient," Yang said.

"Therefore our data system can not only monitor and reflect on the governments, but can also reveal some important problems while examining the rate of missing data," he said.

Yang said the team will continue developing the database's categories and will set up a permanent fixed platform for data release as well as a data collection platform that does not only collect government statistics.