China's Yangtze River Delta Region, which comprises Shanghai and East China's Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, pledged to deepen cooperation on big data applications by launching a big data alliance on July 17.

The cooperation memorandum, signed among local authorities, marked a fresh step taken to further boost regional integration, said Zhang Ying, chief engineer of the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Information Technology.

Occupying just 4 percent of Chinese territory, the region generated roughly a quarter of China's 82.7 trillion yuan ($12.4 trillion) Gross Domestic Product last year, and is a primary base and pilot zone for advanced manufacturing and smart city initiatives, which rely heavily on the use of big data.

"To unlock the full potential of how data can revolutionize different industries, the region should leverage its strengths in new energy cars, robots, integrated circuits, civil aviation, e-commerce and mobile payment," Zhang said.

Under the alliance, the region will share experiences in data usage in a bid to co-create a world-class advanced manufacturing hub and city cluster, said Chen Weili, vice-head of the Shanghai Hongqiao Central Business District.

The signing ceremony also witnessed the launch of two big data-themed competitions, the Shanghai Open Data Apps and the Brain of Things, both of which feature big data mining to serve a number of real-life scenarios.