The Government of the Canary Islands reinforces its commitment to open data with a new portal that unifies access to the information of the islands

The Canary Islands Government has launched the new Canary Islands Open Data Portal, hosted in the domain datos.canarias.es, with more than 7,500 data. This makes it the single access point with the most public information data registered in the whole of Spain. The new Canary Islands Open Data Portal replaces the previous opendata.gobiernodecanarias.org, created in 2015 and with a catalogue of around 190 data. This increase is due to the union in a single portal of data from the Government of the Canary Islands, the Canary Islands Statistics Institute (ISTAC) and the Territorial Information System of the Canary Islands (SITCAN).

The vast majority of these datasets have been federated with datos.gob.es. This means that they are now accessible from our platform and are thus automatically federated with the European Data Portal, boosting their visibility at national and international level. With this action, the Canary Islands has become the autonomous community that federates the most information in datos.gob.es. Specifically, 7,460 data have been added, which represents around 20% of the total available in the catalogue.

datos.canarias.es: a single point of access to island information

The Canary Islands Open Data Portal has been promoted by the Directorate General for Transparency and Citizen Participation, in collaboration with the Directorate General for Telecommunications and New Technologies, both dependent on the Regional Ministry of Public Administrations, Justice and Security; the ISTAC and the Canary Islands Cartographic Company (GRAFCAN).

The objective of datos.canarias.es is to become in the future the only access point to open data in the Canary Islands in collaboration with the rest of the public administrations of the Islands, this being one of the commitments made by the regional government in the IV Open Government Plan of Spain 2020-2024.

Likewise, the graphic identity itself has been renewed, creating a new graphic image as a brand associated with this project that helps to identify and promote the actions developed around the open data of all the public administrations of the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands.

New functionalities

From datos.canarias.es it is possible to consult and download not only general information, but also statistical and territorial information related to the archipelago, which means that the Canary Islands Government complies with Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on open data and the re-use of public sector information, which prioritises these two categories.

The Director General for Transparency and Citizen Participation of the Canary Islands Government, Marta Saavedra, explains that the new portal presents new features such as data visualisation, which publishes graphs or data views that help to understand and relate the data; the data history section, a small blog where stories will be created based on the information hosted on the portal; or the applications section, a section that shows resources created, and which will be created, such as the School Map, the Crop Map or the Canary Islands Meteorological Observation System, among others.

Another new feature is the presentation of the information organised by statistics, territories and classified into 22 categories. Likewise, the data catalogue section has also been created, where the different sets can be found. This sets are associated a series of metadata such as name, description, formats, licensing or update frequency, allowing the information to be located and understood; and the developers section, dedicated to reusers who work by extracting information from the data in an automated manner.

The Canary Islands has been singled out by the European Open Data maturity indicators as an exemplary government in the opening of data, specifically for the #OpenDataMujeresCanarias project in 2019, which aimed to promote the use of open data to raise awareness, promote gender equality and encourage a balance between free time and work life and an equal distribution of public and private responsibilities between men and women.

From datos.gob.es we invite you to visit the catalogue and discover for yourself all the data of the Government of the Canary Islands.