The search engine Linknovate and the virtual library Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes, Aporta Awards 2017

The innovative search engine Linknovate and the virtual library Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes have been the two winning projects of the first edition of the Aporta Awards 2017. An initiative promoted by the Secretary of State for the Information Society, Red.es and the General Secretariat of the Digital Administration with the aim of recognizing and disseminating innovative projects developed with public data and to which, in this first edition, 15 candidatures have been submitted. The awards took place on October 24, as the final highlight of the Encuentro Aporta 2017  that in this edition brought together national and international experts in open data under the claim "The value of data in the global ecosystem".

Linknovate, an innovative search engine

Innovative tool oriented to the business sector and focused on helping the search of business data (B2B) efficiently and easily, in a way that favors competitive intelligence and innovation. It is the largest database of science and technology entities, with more than 20 million references (single documents) and more than 2.3 million unique indexed entities (companies and research groups). The data is obtained from open scientific documents (scientific publications, conference proceedings, grants, ...), industrial documents (patents, trademarks, news, corporate websites) and unique information from direct contact with experts. It is as easy to use as a search engine but it provides a discovery experience and facilitates the interpretation of the found data. In the words of Manuel Noya, founding partner and CEO of Linknovate (in the upper left picture), "it is a business intelligence tool with which we help companies to better understand the technologies and emerging markets. But not only that, lso the structuring of data, its visualization, the new technologies and the key players that are behind these new technologies such as internet of things, cybersecurity, virtual reality ... etc ".

 Manuel Noya, CEO of Linknovate: "We have developed a competitive intelligence tool and we help companies to better understand emerging technologies and markets, the structuring of data and its visualization, and we value a type of data with a social component very important which can advance science in a faster way ".

Linknovate works, fundamentally, in competitive intelligence to understand what its competitors are doing and, above all, to identify partners: research groups or companies of interest to reach agreements. "What makes us peculiar," adds Manuel Noya, "is that we value a type of data that has a very important social component which can advance science in a faster way, help companies to have more visibility and connect more easily with each others. " "In the end," concludes Noya, "we help companies not to re-invent the wheel and have a good map of who does what before launching a new product."

Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes-BVMC, a new approach of virtual libraries 

Developed by the Fundación Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, the main objective of data.cervantesvirtual.com is to improve the data quality, access and reuse of its funds, based on internationally recognized standards aimed at digital environments such as RDA. With a dynamic approach and constant open innovation, it seeks to improve the user experience and also promote the use of open data by the community, participating in congresses and publishing in scientific journals.

Manuel Bravo, general director of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Foundation: "our virtual library is the pioneering project in digital libraries, we started to share and create a library on the Internet, accessible to all, and with a collaborative approach from the start. BVMC is now a reference space that brings together technology and humanities. "

Data.cervantesvirtual.com, in comparison with traditional systems, offers a novel user experience allowing browsing bibliographic records through their properties and relationships such as, for example, the language, most relevant dates, authors and the role they play in the works, editions, translations and formats. For more expert users, the interface includes a SPARQL access point, enabling the execution of any type of query against the repository. Manuel Bravo, general director of the Virtual Foundation Miguel de Cervantes, (in the image above right) noted that "our virtual library is possibly the pioneering project in digital libraries, we were born in the year 98, when the Internet was not what it is today, with a dimension in Spanish and in Latin America and also in Europe, we started to share and create a library on the Internet, accessible to everyone and with a collaborative silvering from the start ". The BVMC has become one of the great examples of the transfer of knowledge from the university to society in the humanities area. "We have become - said Bravo - in a space that brings together technology and humanities, a reference space that also allows not only researchers but teachers, educators, to reuse data to create educational materials, to the general public because it can access to the best digital books of the Spanish language and the classics of Spanish and Iberian America, and we have also become an example of how to disseminate culture, respecting copyrights and intellectual property rights, and at the same time be a high-level technological project. " "All our development is done in open source and it was decisive to talk about open data," concluded the general director of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Foundation.

In the context of libraries, open data is playing a very important role as regards visibility and access. Initiatives and international organizations such as Wikidata and BBC have placed their focus on the BVMC. The Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Foundation was established in 2000. Its Board of Trustees is chaired by Mario Vargas Llosa (Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010), its vice-president is the Rector of the University of Alicante and Mario Benedetti is Patron of Honor since June 2009. The Foundation manages the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, the Vargas Llosa Chair and the Impact Digitalization Competence Center.