The Fourth United Nations World Data Forum kicked off in Hangzhou City, east China's Zhejiang Province on Monday.

The forum was held for the first time in the Asia-Pacific region, with China as the host country. 

There will be six plenary meetings and 72 parallel sessions in the following three days, designed to stimulate exchanges and cooperation among global data users and producers. And more than 1,000 representatives from over 100 countries and regions will attend the forum.

With the theme "Towards Data that Empowers Our World," the forum focuses on four major areas, including innovation and cooperation on data, exploration of data value, improvement of data credibility and the construction of a sound data ecology.

In 2020, the United Nations set up one of its four regional hubs for Big Data in Zhejiang Province. Soon after that, another UN institute, the Global Geospatial Knowledge and Innovation Center, was established in the province last year.

"Despite the impact of the epidemic in the past three years, the Hangzhou regional hub has maintained exchanges and cooperation with other international organizations and centers, and achieved good results by online and offline activities, according to Mao Shengyong, deputy director of the National Bureau of Statistics, at a press conference held this morning.

Stefan Schweinfest, director of UN Statistics Division, said that they have been "working very closely with China."

"I think one of the characteristics of China that is very important, particular in this part of China and Zhejiang Province, are these public private partnerships, where the government works together with key companies in order to improve the data that are important for the entire country in order to develop," he added.

Zhejiang has a foundation for data construction. The province's vice governor, Xu Wenguang said its capital city has fostered 11,000 digital high-tech enterprises, including one of the world's top 500 enterprises and 164 listed enterprises.