Encuentro Aporta 2016, good business practices in the field of open data reuse

In the words of Secretary General of the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism, Mr. Victor Calvo-Sotelo, the open data sector in Spain has a direct economic impact of 1,700 million euros, creating approximately thirteen thousand jobs in the country. Given these data, there is no doubt that the open data have become an engine for national socio-economic growth.

In this context, the second session at Encuentro Aporta 2016 was devoted to good business practices in the area of open data reuse, which brought together representatives of the companies Carto, Euroalert and Third B who showed their experience as data reusers, and identifying the current opportunities and barriers that they face in accessing and processing information.

Miguel Arias, COO of Carto, was the first of the speakers to explain the services of this start-up, which provides geographic location information to a great number of international entities belonging to the banking sector, public institutions, technological industries and, even, media.

According to his experience, 80% of companies collect geospatial data, but most of them do not reuse this information for business optimization. To help the business in this task, Carto has launched the Data Observatory initiative, an open source platform, which collects open data from different countries and offers that information to the community that can participate and enrich the project. Thus, companies can turn their data into intelligence, a fact that will help them make strategic decisions for their business.

Then it was the turn of Jose Luis Marin from Euroalert, company that provides different digital content services based on information from the governments of the European Union. Thanks to the reuse of open data, this entity is able to help business find answers to questions on specific sectors, such as in the case of the refining industry, serving to fifteen different customers. J. Luis Marin wanted to highlight the barriers that the infomediary companies are currently facing when accessing data from different sources of information.  According to his experience, Public Administrations should publish data under conditions that a re-user can reproduce the same service is provided for free. The lack of common standards and protocols make difficult information crossing and it slows down and hinders the activities of companies like Euroalert whose work is based on the treatment and reuse of data. This was the same conclusion reached by TerceroB, represented by its chief operating officer, Daniel del Pozo, a company responsible for closing this second session.

Specializing in real estate, this online portal reuses the cadastral information of the different Spanish public bodies to build their services. However, as in the case of Euroalert, the expert emphasized that the legislative, data and skills heterogeneity makes difficult the reuse in Spain for this type of companies that transform data into knowledge.

As a final point of this session, the three speakers agreed emphasize the importance of combining intelligence and open data to transform data into actionable knowledge, enabling decision making to the benefit not only of the private sector, but of society in general. To this end, it is essential to standardize and structure the data, while their accessibility is increased so infomediary sector can exploit them and give them value, as these three companies do in the commercial, technological and real estate industry.