Common Directory content (DIR3) published in open and reusable format (RDF-XML)

The Common Directory of Organic Units and Offices -also known as Common Directory or DIR3- provides a unified and common inventory of more than 77,000 organic units and 5,900 Offices of the State, Regional and Local Administration and Universities. Its main goal is to facilitate the co-distributed information maintenance. This is a basic service provided to all Public Administrations, whose availability and maintenance is essential for the functioning of several electronic administration platforms such as: Electronic Invoicing, Registry Interconnection System, the Office of Virtual Registry (ORVE), Administration Information System (SIA) or the Single Edictal Board.

The Common Directory is updated by the bodies assigned to the inventory, that send the information that is subsequently stored in a database which, to date, had been published in spreadsheet format.

As part of a collaborative project between the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration and the public entity Red.es, and taking into account the previous work done by several members of the W3C Open Data Spain group, the semantic descriptions in RDF format of the information contained in the DIR3 have been created and implemented.

The files associated with all the information from DIR3, in open and reusable format (RDF-XML), are available for their reuse through the Electronic Office of the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration, as well as from the corresponding tab in the national open data catalogue. Also, the related vocabularies have been discharged in the prefix.cc and Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) systems, in order to achieve greater dissemination.

This effort to transform the content into RDF-XML reinforces the compliance with article 9 of the National Interoperability Scheme (Royal Decree 4/2010), making possible the use of semantic descriptions made from any resource of the Administration, and facilitating visualizations and applications that represent information based on the vocabulary specified above.