Aragón Open Data

Aragón Open Data, the open data portal of the Government of Aragón, will present its most recent work on 15 March 2023 to present its lines of action and progress in the field of open data and linked data.

What does 'Aragón Open Data: Open and connect data' consist of?

In this meeting, which is part of the events framed in the Open Data Days 2023, Aragón Open Data will take the opportunity to talk about the evolution of its open data platform and the improvement of the quality of the data offered.

In this line, the conference 'Aragón Open Data: Open and connect data' will also focus on detailing the functioning of Aragopedia, its new linked data strategy.

Through a series of technical explanations, supported by a demo, attendees will learn how this service works, based on the new structure of Interoperable Information of Aragon (EI2A) that allows sharing, connecting and relating certain data available on the Aragon Open Data portal.

In order to detail as precisely as possible, the approach of the conference, we share the programme below:

• Welcome to the conference. Julián Moyano, coordinator of Aragón Open Data.
• Introduction to Aragón Open Data (Marc Garriga, Desidedatum)
• Improving the quality of the data and its semantisation (Koldo Z. / Susana G.)
• Previous situation and current situation
• New navigation focused on Aragón Open Data and Aragopedia data (Pedro M. / Beni)
• Explanation and Demo
• My experience with Aragopedia (Sofía Arguís, Documentalist and user of Aragón Open Data )
• Process of identification, processing and opening of new data (Cristina C.)
• Starting point and challenges encountered to achieve openness.
• Conclusions (Marc Garriga)
• Question/Comment Time

Where and when is it being held?

The technical conference 'Aragón Open Data: Open and connect data' will be held on 15 March from 12:00 to 13:30 online. Therefore, in order to attend it, interested users must fill in the form available at the following point.

How can I register?

To attend and access the online session you can fill in the following form and if you have any questions, do not hesitate to write to us at opendata@aragon.es.

Aragón Open Data is co-financed by the European Union, European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) "Building Europe from Aragon.

Aragón Open Data is 10 years old and to celebrate it they have launched a datathon entitled "The future of data". The event will take place on 25 November.

What is the datathon about?

The aim of the meeting, organised together with Fractal Strategy, is for citizens to experiment and generate new ideas based on open data that add value to society.

Aragon open Data will propose six challenges. Participants will have to choose one of the challenges or propose another of their choice. Throughout the day they will have to work in teams to create a new service that responds to the selected challenge, using a series of outstanding open datasets available in Aragon Open Data.

At the end of the day, a winning solution will be chosen based on three criteria: the novelty of the proposal, idea or service, its impact on society and the quality of the presentation where the two previous points are defended. Each member of the winning team will receive a voucher worth 50 euros to be exchanged in commercial surfaces in Aragon.

Los retos disponibles son los siguientes:

The following challenges are available:

• Connect with nature. This challenge will include solutions that map resources and points of interest for learning, doing sport or rural tourism, working from less populated places, enjoying leisure time or sharing experiences while enjoying nature.
• More lively neighbourhoods. In this case, solutions are sought that focus on young people and families of the future, addressing issues related to accessible housing, public and sustainable transport, local commerce, etc.
• Employment opportunities. This challenge is aimed at generating proposals that help people to find new employment opportunities in Aragon, through ideas for new industrial products, business initiatives or the mapping of commercial activity, among others.
• University life. With the aim of helping students to make decisions, solutions aimed at planning efforts, making professional contacts, discovering new fields of study and research, etc., will be valued.
• Conocer Aragón. Este reto se enfoca en destacar la oferta de ocio, hostelería y alojamientos, el patrimonio, la agenda cultural o las propuestas de turismo de la región con el fin de darla a conocer a locales y visitantes.
• Getting to know Aragon. This challenge focuses on highlighting the region's leisure, hospitality and accommodation offer, heritage, cultural agenda and tourism proposals in order to make Aragon known to locals and visitors.
• Renewable energies. The last challenge focuses on solutions to advance the sustainable use of energy and the development of new sources of energy resources.

Who can participate?

The event is open to both students and professionals from various fields, including communication, documentation, engineering, design, humanities, social sciences and law.

Participants will work in multidisciplinary teams, which will be formed on the day of the competition. If a participant comes with his or her team already formed, he or she can indicate it in the registration email.

Where does it take place?

The event is face-to-face. It will be held at the headquarters of the Centro de Artesanía de Aragón // Centro Aragonés de Diseño Industrial (CADI), in the building of the Old Municipal Slaughterhouse of Zaragoza, entrance on Calle del Monasterio de Samos, 42 (Zaragoza), on 25 November 2022, from 10:00 to 19:00.

Attendees should bring their own computer.

Food and drink will be provided by the organisers.

How can I register?

Registration is free and will be open until 23 November 2022 at 14h. To do so, please send an email to opendata@aragon.es with your name, age, profession / field of study and the subject "Registration for The Future of Data". If you already know which challenge you want to focus on, it is recommended that you also include it in the email.

These types of competitions are an excellent opportunity to put your knowledge into practice, learn from those with more experience and make new contacts. For these reasons, an increasing number of companies are using hackathons as a mechanism to locate and attract talent.

More information about the datathon on the Aragon Open Data website.

The first National Open Data Meeting will take place in Barcelona on 21 November. It is an initiative promoted and co-organised by Barcelona Provincial Council, Government of Aragon and Provincial Council of Castellón, with the aim of identifying and developing specific proposals to promote the reuse of open data.

This first meeting will focus on the role of open data in developing territorial cohesion policies that contribute to overcoming the demographic challenge.

Agenda

The day will begin at 9:00 am and will last until 18:00 pm.

After the opening, which will be given by Marc Verdaguer, Deputy for Innovation, Local Governments and Territorial Cohesion of the Barcelona Provincial Council, there will be a keynote speech, where Carles Ramió, Vice-Rector for Institutional Planning and Evaluation at Pompeu Fabra University, will present the context of the subject.

Then, the event will be divided into four sessions where the following topics will be discussed:

• 10:30 a.m. State of art: lights and some shadows of opening and reusing data.
• 12:30 p.m. What does society need and expect from public administrations' open data portals?
• 15:00. Local commitment to fight against depopulation through open data
• 4:30 p.m. What can Public Administrations do using their data to jointly fight depopulation?

Experts linked to various open data initiatives, public organisations and business associations will participate in the conference. Specifically, the Aporta Initiative will participate in the first session, where the challenges and opportunities of the use of open data will be discussed.

The importance of addressing the demographic challenge

The conference will address how the ageing of the population, the geographical isolation that hinders access to health, administrative and educational centres and the loss of economic activity affect the smaller municipalities, both rural and urban. A situation with great repercussions on the sustainability and supply of the whole country, as well as on the preservation of culture and diversity.

A large number of different data sources with different contents and formats coexist in an open data portal. It is therefore necessary to provide each file, resource or content on the network with a context or definition that allows people, and also machines, to interpret its meaning. This is where the concept of Linked data comes in.

Linked Data allows the web to be used as a single large global database. Following this publishing paradigm, data is available in context and interconnected for reuse. Linked Data emerged from the Semantic Web project inspired by Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web, from the need to introduce contextual information in the form of metadata on the Web.

The document "LinkedData as an open data model" briefly explains the basic concepts to understand how the semantic web and linked data works, such as the case of URIs or unique resource identifiers, ontologies or vocabularies that allow the description of relationships between them, to focus on how Aragon has implemented these technologies to develop different services, such as:

• The Interoperable Information Structure (EI2A), an ontology that homogenises structures, vocabularies and characteristics to respond to the diversity and heterogeneity of existing data within the Administration, within the framework of Aragon Open Data. The document explains some of the ontologies and vocabularies used for the development.
• The European Legislation Identifier (ELI), which allows online access to legislation in a formalised format that facilitates its reuse.
• The semantic infrastructure in Aragon Open Data, where the use of the Virtuoso tool for the storage of linked data stands out. The document explains the characteristics of this universal server, whose architecture allows the persistence of data in RDF-XML formats, among others. In addition, it explains how the bank that stores triplets in a native way for resources relationships works and shows examples of services of Aragon Open data that exploit these triplets of data as Aragopedia and Aragon Open Data Pool.

You can then download the full document (only available in Spanish).

This document is part of the series of educational materials and technological articles that Aragón open Data is producing in order to explain how they have deployed different solutions to respond to the needs for location, access and reuse of the different sets of data. You can complete your reading with another volume in the series: "How to implement CKAN: real case of the Aragon Open Data portal".

Aragon Open Data is one of the most active open data initiatives on the Spanish scene. In addition to the implementation, management and maintenance of an interoperable data catalogue, since its inception Aragon Open Data has carried out actions to bring the culture of open data closer to citizens, companies and all types of organisations. These initiatives include the development of services to offer the data and facilitate its reuse in a simple way such as Aragopedia, Open Social Data or the recent Aragón Open Data Focus (more information available in this interview).

Given the knowledge that they hold, it is not surprising that they have begun to develop educational materials and technological articles with the aim of explaining how they have deployed different solutions to respond to the needs of localisation, access and reuse of the different sets of data.

Below is one such material, which focuses on explaining how they have implemented the CKAN software solution to improve the availability of data on the portal.

CKAN as an open data management software solution in a real case for the Aragon Open Data portal

CKAN is a free, open-source platform developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation for publishing and cataloguing data collections. Due to its free and open nature, as well as its rapid implementation, it has become a worldwide reference for the opening of data.

Since its birth in 2012, Aragon Open Data has bet on CKAN technology for the management of its open data system. The document "CKAN, cornerstone for the management of an open data system" shows us how its architecture works and serves as an example for other initiatives that want to implement a platform of this type.

The document describes the challenges they encountered when migrating the original platform to a higher version and how they solved it by building a client application. This process resulted in the current architecture of the portal, which is shown in the figure below:

The CKAN backend is developed entirely in Python, with its own Javascript front end, and allows the deployment of a layer of services that can be managed from an API, and the use of base plugins or extensions that provide additional functionalities to the platform. CKAN is supported by a PostgreSQL database, where the datasets it houses, its resources and other metadata required for the operation of the platform are stored, and makes use of Solr, a search engine that helps to speed up the location and availability of the datasets.

In addition to explaining this architecture, the document discusses the functionalities and extensions used in the customised CKAN instance, and how the set of components integrated into the platform: Angular, NodeJS, PostgreSQL and Solr coexist to provide data sets that are the basis for the development of open data services and solutions such as Presupuestos de Aragón or the already mentioned Aragón Open Data Focus.

CKAN incorporates an extension that supports RFD data serialisation which, in addition to allowing the exposure of linked data in formats such as RDF-XML or Turtle, is used to federate datasets that follow the DCAT specification of metadata, making CKAN a more versatile and appropriate platform for the publication of Linked Data, something that Aragon Open Data has also done as we can see in this other document.

You can download the document "CKAN as an open data management software solution in a real case for the Aragon Open Data portal" below (only available in Spanish). You can also complement your reading with these two additional articles:

• Automatic collection of open data: Explains how Aragon Open Data federates open data using a CKAN plugin.
• ELK architecture as an open data tool: Explains how Aragon Open Data uses an architecture based on the ELK technology stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana).

Aragón Open Data continues with its series of webinars and has proposed new appointments:

• Wednesday June 24th 2020 (9:30-10:45). Online seminar "Open Data: an alternative source of information for the professionals of the future

The event is aimed at students of degrees linked to the social sciences who are interested in finding an alternative source of information to work with and draw valuable conclusions. This is a short event in which it will be explained what Aragon Open Data is, what open data is and how it can help students in their daily lives. The event will have a short lecture on how to use open data as a tool to know the Sustainable Development Objectives (ODS).

• Friday, June 26, 2020 (9:30-11:00) Online conference "Open data for an informed society".

The event is aimed at Aragonese associations that work to guarantee the interests and rights of citizens. As in the previous case, the event will focus on explaining what Aragon Open Data is, what open data is and how it can help associations in their day-to-day work.

•  Monday 29th June 2020 (9:30-11:00). Online conference "The value of open data as a new engine for competitiveness and economic development”

The event is aimed at managers and directors of companies in Aragon. The objective, in this case, is that attendees know the possibilities of open data for the business network.

How is the dynamic of the event?

As in the events organized on June 12th and 16th, a participatory dynamic has been proposed. Through a series of online questions, the attendees will be able to tell what their problems are when accessing public information so that Aragon Open Data can see how to deal with these needs.

During the event, the attendees will have the opportunity to ask, debate and share their point of view from a series of topics proposed for reflection.

What do I have to do to participate?

All events will be broadcast via the Zoom online connection platform.

To confirm your attendance, you must write to opendata@aragon.es, indicating your name and your studies, company or association - according to the webinar of interest -.

In any case, both for those who can attend the event and for those who cannot, Aragon Open Data invites you to answer a brief survey through the following link.

Aragón Open Data, the Government of Aragon's open data portal, has launched a series of webinars for the next few days aimed at different audiences:

• On July 12th, from 9:30 to 11:00, the online seminar “Aragón Open Data como herramienta de transparencia y rendición de cuentas” (Aragón Open Data as a tool for transparency and accountability) will be held, aimed at public auditors interested in the use and reuse of open data for the development of their activity.
• On June 15th, at the same time, Aragón Open Data como herramienta de transparencia y rendición de cuentas” (The creation of value-added products and services through the use of open data") will take place. In this case, the target audience is professionals with a technical profile, mainly those belonging to the programming and development groups.

Both events will be broadcast via the Zoom online connection platform and will have a dual purpose:

• On the one hand, to make each of these groups aware of the Aragon Open Data project.
• On the other hand, to be able to identify their needs and expectations regarding open data, in order to take them into account for possible improvements.

To achieve these goals, the events will develop a participatory work dynamic in which all attendees can collaborate through different interventions and share their experiences. They will also be able to present their opinions as generators of high-value information for both the business and the public sector. In addition, the event taking place on the 12th will be attended by representatives of Open Data Euskadi del Gobierno Vasco and Datadista, who will talk about good practices in terms of data opening.

To confirm attendance at the conference, it will be essential to send an email to opendata@aragon.es indicating name and position, as well as including the name of the event of interest in the subject of the message.

Aragón Open Data: open data closer to people

The Government of Aragon's open data portal offers companies and citizens data in open format that are managed by the public administration. Specifically, it currently offers more than 2,000 datasets. Among the objectives of this initiative are the creation of economic wealth through the use of data, the reuse of information or the promotion of transparency.

The public openness of the data is a great benefit for the quality of the information as it allows to know and share its use within the administration through different areas. The commitment of Aragon Open Data to this reality has led to the emergence of the Aragon Open Data Focus initiative, a programme that seeks to bring the objectives of the portal closer to users and thus better understand the needs of both open data publishers and the users and groups involved.

To gather this information, apart from events, Aragón Open Data has also launched a survey, which can be accessed through this link.