Soil and Water Conservation Bureau(SWCB), as the authority of Taiwan soil and water conservation as well as slopeland management, has been collecting hundreds of terabyte data such as satellite and aerial images, field investigation data, geographic data and sensors data since 1990’s. Faced with increasingly data issues, SWCB began to establish their geospatial data warehouse since 2005 by using RDBMS and upgraded gradually in the decade, a central database management mechanism has been made and solve the storage problem however, data usage in SWCB is still a hard issue when one who needs to integrate or fuse various data together to support decision making because of no common vocabularies, standards and data catalog.

With a deep research and lessons learnt from trench in the decade, SWCB has found the most essential problem of its strait of data usage, is lack of data governance policy, it leads SWCB to reform their data policy in 2016. Although SWCB is still developing its data policy, the principles of SWCB’s data policy has been addressed which are: data as asset, data is shared, data is accessible, data is secured, data trustee, data vocabulary and standards, etc,.

Data, no matter geospatial or non-spatial, should be seen as national assets, therefore, data also should be managed as an asset, this idea refers to that the dataset manager should oversee and audit the status of data during its life cycle. Dataset manager needs to define what activities should be done at each life cycle phase.

SWCB is defining its own data lifecycle phases, which are define/inventory/obtain/access/maintain/evaluate/reserve. In the context of data asset, a data asset management mechanism is coming up with which covers every data life cycle phases will ensure data can be overseen under a pre-defined quality control before using. SWCB’s data policy is independent from technologies due to its universality and generality, will be a good role model to other authorities who is lack of data policy.