Interview with Manuel Noya and José López Veiga, Linknovate's associates

Linknovate, the winning company of the 1st edition of Aporta Awards, is a software provider that tracks all the scientific production published on the internet, ranking the contents according to its own algorithm. Its search engine optimizes the time spent searching for information, facilitating contact between the academic and the business world.

We interviewed Manuel Noya and José López Veiga, Linknovate's associates, to tell us about their experience and opinion about the reuse of public information in Spain.

Linknovate is one of the biggest database of science and technology, with more than 20 million references, what is the potential of the data that you make available to citizens and companies?

At Linknovate we do not focus so much on the amount of documents, although we have a very good coverage from 2010 to 2018, but on its quality and usefulness. It is about understanding perfectly what organizations are behind those documents, who are their authors, their keywords, etc. There are many scientific databases but none puts the focus on cleaning and providing insights on these data, and broadening the perspective to what matters to companies: applications, related products... It is important to know what the specific activity of a company is, because it can be a potential partner or competitor.

What public information sources do you use to enrich your database?

Let's say that they can be divided into academic and industrial sources. In the academic world, we have scientific publications and conference proceedings with a similar coverage to Elsevier's Scopus, one of the most complete (and expensive) academic databases. On the other hand, in the industrial world, we obtain information from US and European trademark and patent registrations, news, corporate websites, etc. We could include a third type of sources, the academic-industrial mix, where we could find scholarships and European (FP7, H2020) and American (NSF, SBIR / STTR, DOE) projects.

In your opinion, what are the main sectors of activity that take advantage of Linknovate's open data potential? Who reuses the data and what is their objective?

Professionals from strategy, technology and innovation sectors, with the goal of making data-based decisions (business intelligence), the development of new products and searching for improvements (in products and processes). We target both industry professionals and researchers from technology centres and institutes.

How could we promote open scientific data in Spain?

 Promoting and rewarding those who enable open data, and above all, ensuring that quality data is appropriate. For example, it is important to promote "machine-readable" data, that is, readable by a machine without investing resources in cleaning and structuring the information. Many innovation data in Spain, for example, those related to companies that receive public funding, are public (you can see the redundancy if you try to explain it), but a large majority are non-readable PDFs, which can be processed without human intervention.

If an organization is motivated to share its data, with quality, due to an incentives system, in the long term, that and other organizations from the sector would confirm the benefits, as happens with open access software, reaching levels difficult to achieve by their own, without a community. Without incentives, this barrier is difficult to overcome, although the trend is clearly positive: there are more and more success stories.

What measures do you consider necessary to encourage national private sector companies to open, reuse and create innovative services based on open data?

In certain "structural" sectors it should be mandatory for companies to share their data as part of the services they provide (for example, concessionaires or bid winners), especially in sectors such as health, energy, public financing, etc. Always taking care of user’s privacy, of course.

In other cases, increasing public subsidies and incentives (tax incentives, innovation bonds, etc.) can be the necessary boost for a company to test and test what they can do with its Open Data. Promoting startups and SMEs that create value from these data makes the ecosystem grow and be sustainable: a company has more and more "answers" to the challenges that hide their data.

What are the next steps that Linknovate will follow as regards open data?

Now we are focusing on a new functionality: the ability to "follow" a topic (thanks to our ability to follow companies and / or research groups, and find news, patents, publications and almost any document related to innovation). A second part of this "alert system" is the ability to make a brief summary and visualize "insights", such as which new companies have searched for the topic or what new applications are more popular, among others.

Do you think initiatives such as the 2017 Aporta Awards can help boost the reuse of open data? What other initiatives of this kind do you think should be put into practice?

Of course. Awards, such as Aporta, help to give visibility to small companies that make up this ecosystem.

We believe that facilitating private contest and competitions is the key (where both the data and the need / challenge to solve come from the private company / industry). The public sector can and should be the one who opens the way, but this is only sustainable when the industry is aligned. The public sector should give an example of how to easy share open data, with quality and traceability. The European Data Portal and CORDIS are examples to follow.