The new Open Data Portal of the Provincial Council of Castellón

The number of public institutions and local governments that continue to commit to implementing initiatives aimed at bringing open information closer to the public is growing all the time. If a few months ago we shared the work of Gipuzkoa Irekia or Open Data BizKaia, now it is the turn of the Provincial Council of Castellón, which has just presented a new open data portal.

How has the open data portal changed?

Son muchas las actividades en materia de datos abiertos que llevan a cabo desde la Diputación de Castellón en general, y su servicio de Servicio de Administración e Innovación Pública, en particular, pero en todas ellas el foco está puesto, básicamente, en la difusión, en el conocimiento y la reutilización de la información procedente de los datos abiertos.

There are many open data activities carried out by the Castellón Provincial Council in general, and its Public Administration and Innovation Service in particular, but in all of them the focus is basically on the dissemination, knowledge and reuse of information from open data.

Thus, on the one hand, an open data strategy has been drawn up with the aim of marking the way forward and, on the other, a council of re-users is working with the aim of advising the staff in charge of the governance of the portal, to identify and develop specific content that can be published openly.

Continuing with the idea of improving the open data strategy and bringing it closer to companies and users, the Castellón Provincial Council has completed the process of redesigning its portal, two years after its implementation. The portal maintains its technical and data governance functionalities, but includes important new features in terms of its image and themes.

Design of the new cover

Of all the visual changes recently implemented, perhaps the most significant has been the redesign of the new homepage. It has opted to offer a more visual orientation, which seeks, on the one hand, to highlight a series of data stories, created by combining the most consulted datasets on the portal, and on the other, to highlight the data relating to the fight against depopulation.

The dashboards or visualisations incorporated into the new front page are a great help for better monitoring and analysing information on key datasets.

Dataset and user statistics

The Castellón Provincial Council's data catalogue currently consists of 96 datasets that are classified in 17 thematic areas of the NTI-RISP. In addition, it should be noted that 49 of these datasets contain geographic information.

The most popular datasets are:

• Urban planning
• Demography
• Mayors of the province

In numerical terms, the urban planning dataset totals 1200 downloads and 33 thousand API calls. In terms of users, the estimated number of unique users who interacted with the domain last April reached 1,000.

Data against depopulation

Another important new feature of the new open data portal is the section dedicated to the depopulation of the territory, which includes all the datasets related to the services provided to the rural world to combat depopulation.

At present, this section is made up of six datasets with information related or linked to the towns in the interior of the province.

The 6 datasets included in this section on depopulation are distributed as follows:

• ATMs against depopulation, which aim to provide financial services in rural areas where it is difficult to find one.
• Electric vehicle recharging points, which aim to promote the use of electric vehicles to the detriment of more polluting conventional vehicles.
• Housing in municipalities in the province, to highlight the unequal distribution of the population between municipalities, based on geographical location within the province.
• Care centres, so that any citizen who needs them knows where to go if they require assistance.
• WiFi points in the province of Castellón, so that citizens who need it can access the Internet easily and free of charge, wherever they are.
• A list of defibrillators so that citizens can be informed of their location so that they can be called upon in the event of an emergency.

The final purpose of these 6 datasets is to make users aware of the closest services available to them, with the added intention of strengthening their presence in those areas of the province where they are currently scarce. This solution highlights the value of open data: it provides useful information to prevent regressive impacts of the population in the short and medium term, while helping to make an x-ray of the basic needs in terms of services and urgent facilities.

To generate these datasets, the Castellón Provincial Council has partnered with external institutions such as the Agència Valenciana Antidespoblament (AVANT), and with other internal departments that facilitate access to information on basic services and facilities in the towns of the interior of the province of Castellón.

In addition, for some of the datasets with geographical information, the Castellón Provincial Council has produced an interactive map. Specifically, in these six dashboards, different types of graphs and indicators are presented, which are automatically updated with the data, accompanied by a short story that facilitates their interpretation.

Data visualisations

Another of the highlights of the new data portal of the Castellón Provincial Council is the commitment to the visual content of the datasets. For each dataset, the user can generate their own graphs and maps that can be shared or embedded either through an iFrame or as a widget.

Assistance to municipalities

The government of the data portal maintains a close relationship with the Provincial Service of Assistance to Municipalities (SEPAM) in order to, in an act of openness and transparency, contribute to providing updated information on the municipalities of Castellón in terms of their political composition, territorial organisation and presence in social networks.

With this new measure, the portal aims to disseminate and facilitate knowledge of the municipalities of Castellón from the perspective of open data, and to serve as a useful and efficient mechanism for reuse.

On the other hand, it is also intended that the open data portal serves as an element of documentation, to contribute to the reliable and accurate use of the information available on the composition of the local councils and their characteristic elements: population, contact details, etc. The ultimate goal is to bring local governments closer to citizens and businesses.

Data journalism

In recent years, a new journalism specialism that uses open data to tell the news and produce stories has been gaining increasing prominence. Known as data journalism, it uses large datasets to conduct investigations and relies on digital techniques, analysis strategies and data visualisation tools to facilitate understanding of the data. Thanks to data journalism, open data portals of public administrations, agencies and institutions are becoming increasingly important as sources.

Precisely for this reason, the open data portal of the Castellón Provincial Council has designed a specific section dedicated to data journalism, accessible from the home page itself and located within the SPECIALITIES AND EXCHANGES block.

Such is the commitment of the Castellón Provincial Council to make the open data portal known to information professionals that, during the celebrations of the last Open Data Day 2022, journalists were made aware of the possibilities offered by open data. Furthermore, in order to introduce them to the use of datasets and the subsequent analysis and management required by the data, the Provincial Council itself organised a specific event with journalists and professionals from the communication sector in general.

How to expand the open data ecosystem at the provincial level?

With the aim of continuing to disseminate the potential of open data, the Castellón Provincial Council has set a series of objectives aimed at expanding the community and interest in it. These are some of the actions planned for the coming months:

• Seek integration in various international organisations to promote information sharing and good practices in the field of data.
• Continue with the design of new open data visualisations.
• Create a provincial Data Office.
• Hold activities for the promotion and dissemination of open data in partnership with other entities or through participation in commemorative events.
• Constantly review and improve the open data strategy.

In short, the work carried out by the Castellón Provincial Council through the redesign and new strategy of the open data portal highlights the value of local data for citizens and public institutions themselves. Precisely for this reason it is not surprising that more and more councils are being encouraged to open their data and generate valuable services based on it.