Abert@s, the open data initiative of Xunta de Galicia

The open data initiative of Xunta de Galicia, called Abert@s, was published in March 2012 with the aim of promoting the opening of data by the autonomous public sector organizations of Galicia and promoting its reuse. This is a transversal project, although it started and is coordinated by the Agency for Technological Modernization of Galicia (Amtega).

 As we indicated, Abert@s is the reference portal of the Open Data catalog, but there are also other initiatives to reuse information from the public sector of Xunta de Galicia, such as Galiciana in the field of digitalization of bibliographic funds, or the directory of services of the Spatial Data Infrastructure of Galicia in the field of geographic information.

A stable and continuously improving web platform

Abert@s has a catalog with 363 data sets. Most of the published data come from the Galician Institute of Statistics (IGE); the Ministry of Economy, Employment and Industry; the Institute of Territorial Studies (IGE) and Meteogalicia (Meteorological Service of the Xunta de Galicia). Talking about topics, 44.5% of the data sets are related to "economy, business and employment" and "territory, housing and transportation". This percentage increases to 59% if we also add the data related to "health, health care and social services."

Following the publication of the Transparency and Open Government portal of Xunta de Galicia in 2016, a line of cooperation between both initiatives has been promoted. Thanks to that, the publication of datasets on this subject has increased. Some of the most valuable data sets that they have added are the statistics of the requests for access to public information or the statistics of the Transparency and Open Government web portal.

In 7 years, portal data sets have accumulated more than 60,000 downloads in total. The ones considers most interesting by users are:

• School and work calendars
• Data sets related to the elections to the Galicia Parliament
• Relationships of Public Function positions
• Data on the Official Gazetteer of Xunta de Galicia (that is, the official names of provinces, town halls, parishes, etc.)
• Microtoponime initiative datasets (the geolocation of land and coastal accidents, water, land, roads and human entities...)

The catalog web platform is a tool in continuous improvement that, over the years, has been incorporating new features and renewing its design. In this evolution, we can highlight usability improvements and renovation design applied in 2017, optimizing the search engine, participation mechanisms or adding a second level of thematic navigation that facilitates locating data sets based on user preferences.

The importance of internal diffusion

When the portal was launched, it was accompanied by internal dissemination actions. The objective was to publicize the initiative within the organization in order to encourage the participation of all departments for data opening.

Thanks to these campaigns, greater knowledge and interest has been detected among professionals in technical areas, which has had an impact on the quality and quantity of the data included in the catalog. Looking ahead, the focus will be placed on the most functional profiles, since their involvement is essential to make decisions related to information opening.

Driving reuse

In addition to promoting the publication of data, Xunta de Galicia also seeks to promote the reuse of published data sets.

Internally, there are some initiatives in which the Xunta de Galicia acts as a supplier and reuser at the same time, a practice that they consider necessary to externally promote the possibilities of creating services and/or applications with their dataset. For example, since 2013 ”Servicios en el mapa” is available, a tool for the geolocation of points of interest (equipment and services) that currently incorporates information from 22 datasets in the Abert@s catalog. Other examples would be the mobile applications of MeteoGalicia, MeteoSIX o MeteoRoute, which consume data from the API (MapQuest Open Directions API Web Service) of the Meteorological Service of Xunta de Galicia and that accumulate more than 418,000 downloads among all of them.

In addition to internally, Abert@s also seeks to promote reuse by third parties. For this purpose, technical assistance contents have been added to the portal aimed at different profiles (from high to low technical specialization), as well as tools for data visualization. In addition, the section “Tus propuestas” has been created to respond to the demand for data and citizen requests. Thanks to this section they have managed to open to the public data sets that have been requested by citizens and infomediary organizations. For example, some datasets such as “Map of educational centers”, “Registry of associations”, “Directory of web portals by the public sector of Galicia”, “Artisan workshops by the Crafts Registry of Galicia” or “Technical Inspection Stations of Vehicle” have been incorporated into the catalog as a result of analyzing the demands of the Multisectoral Association of Information (ASEDIE).

All these actions are helping the dissemination and growth of Abert@s, a portal with a large amount of regional information that can help and enrich services, products and studies of companies, citizens and all kinds of organizations.

From datos.gob.es, we invite you to discover what is the potential of  Abert@s' data sets.