The open data ecosystem returned to full strength after the summer. During these autumn months, numerous initiatives have emerged to promote the use, reuse and dissemination of open data. They have been very productive weeks, so it has been impossible to collect them all in one post. However, we present you a small selection that will surely be of your interest.

Tools and applications to access more open data

We begin the review of the new developments that have emerged this fall in the open data ecosystem with the initiatives that have been encouraged to make available public data through various tools. We present you some of them:

• Castellón Provincial Council has presented its open data observatory, a great platform of updated information that includes indicators with the actions carried out by the Council to address the COVID, an area of good practice, a section with information on the Council of Reusers and the Provincial Council's Open Data Portal.
• Valencia City Council has renewed its Geoportal with the Smart City app, which shows thousands of open data of the city in fields such as mobility, wifi points, gardening, markets, sports or cultural elements.
• The University of Extremadura has made public its new research portal. The portal automatically collects the scientific and transfer production of the researchers without requiring any effort from the user.
• Ponferrada City Council, together with the company Rendytel, has presented a project to measure air quality in public spaces and buildings using technology based on IoT devices, which provide open data to all citizens. Through their mobile phones, users can find out the state of the air and the level of ventilation in real time and, therefore, assess the possible risk of contagion of Covid-19.

Although this is not a new initiative, we would like to take this opportunity to highlight that the Junta de Castilla y León has received the NovaGob Excellence Award for its work on transparency when displaying data on its portal.

Examples of reuse

Did you know that public bodies, in addition to continuing to open up their information, also continue to create services and products based on its reuse? Here are three examples from this fall:

• The University of Valladolid has developed the application 'Casual Learn', which is based on open data to help users learn art history. The application suggests learning tasks taking into account the interests and location of the user.
• Casual Learn was one of the winning projects in the 4th Castilla y León Open Data Competition, in this case in the category of Teaching Resources. In the Products and Services category, the winner was "Escovid19data", a collaborative collection of data from COVID-19 by province in Spain, while "Castilla y León en remoto" took first place in the ideas category and "Coverage of coronavirus diagnostic tests in Spain" in the data journalism category.
• Onda Town Council has presented an app which offers information on free parking spaces, traffic conditions, environmental parameters and pharmacies on duty. This application is part of the Onda Smart City project, a project which turned out to be the winner of the 12th Aslan Awards, as we reported a few months ago.

In addition to public bodies, we also want to highlight the work done by the four young Basques who have created Dataseeds, a platform at the service of European agricultural SMEs to offer a large amount of open data and facilitate their evolution towards a green transition. With their solution, they have come third in the "A European Green Deal" challenge in the EU Datathon 2020.

Events, courses and publications aimed at disseminating open data

But if there is a reason why autumn has stood out, it has been because of the great number of events, competitions, webinars and other activities aimed at promoting open data.

• Este otoño Asedie ha estrenado nuevo blog. Entre los contenidos que aborda destaca la transformación digital, la inteligencia artificial o los datos abiertos, siempre con el foco puesto en las empresas infomediarias.
• La Iniciativa Aporta acompañó a Databeers Málaga en su primera edición online, que este año estuvo dedicada a los datos abiertos de Copernicus. Si quieres conocer más sobre nuestra participación en esta jornada, puedes hacerlo aquí.
• The Government Obert Chair promoted by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, has transferred to the participants in the Autumn Camp of Transparency and Data Management, the foundations for the understanding of concepts related to open data management. In addition, the Valencian Community has announced during this period that it will train companies and professionals in smart city technologies through the project 'Ciudades conectadas y habitable'.
• Open data not only serves to bring applications to life, but also to enrich journalistic and literary works. The Generalitat de Catalunya has published the book "Open data and artificial intelligence, tools for gender equality". This writing allows us to reflect on how open data is also a key element in the fight against gender discrimination.
• Open data competitions have been a constant throughout the autumn: the Aporta Challenge, the Basque Country Open Data competition, BiscayApp...

Some international proposals

At the international level, some very interesting initiatives have also emerged this autumn.

• The World Bank has launched an open water data portal to help countries make informed decisions that will lead to a water-secure world.
• During these months, the European Data Portal has organized different webinars to address the future of open data portals, where experiences, good practices and opportunities for action have been shown to ensure that open data portals remain useful for the community. These webinars will run until January.
• We end with an international news, but with a local component. Brussels awards a Spanish consortium Yoda, its new European project based on open data. This is the development of a platform for any European citizen to create their own personalized board where they can order different sources of information according to their interests.

These are just some of the most prominent examples that have emerged in the world of open data during the autumn months of 2020. However, if you know of any other news that may be of interest, please do not hesitate to mention it in the comments or send us an email to dinamizacion@datos.gob.es.

Climate change, air pollution and sea pollution. These are the 3 main environmental problems for Spanish citizens according to the latest Eurobarometer "Attitudes of European citizens towards the Environment", published in March 2020. The survey also highlights that 90% of the Spanish population considers to protect the natural environment important. Citizens want more action to be taken and believe that responsibility should be shared between companies, national governments, the EU and citizens themselves.

As with other sectors, such as education or health, open data can also help us to overcome environmental challenges. On the one hand, it provides us with detailed information to understand the situation and to be able to look for solutions. On the other hand, they serve to implement solutions that help us raise awareness and reduce our environmental footprint.

In its report "The Economic Impact of Open Data Opportunities for value creation in Europe”, ", the European Data Portal highlights that data can "contribute to reducing total energy consumption in Europe, increasing the use of sustainable energy sources, protecting biodiversity and raising awareness of CO2 emissions", as well as generating an economic impact of around 1€ billion. Let's look at some examples:

• Reducing energy consumption. Open data-based applications can serve as a tool to help households and institutions to understand and reduce their energy consumption. In this sense, the Regional Government of Castilla y León has launched an Energy Datahub that provides detailed and visual information on energy consumption in the more than 1,500 centres managed by the Regional Government: educational centres, health centres, administrative offices, hospitals, etc. The scorecard facilitates the disaggregated analysis by type of energy (electricity, gas, diesel) and by geographical location, allowing informed decisions to be made. According to the Board itself, thanks to the energy scorecard they have saved more than 12 million euros in electricity since 2015.
• Increase the use of sustainable energy. The 2018 EU directive on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources sets a target for the share of renewable energy in gross final consumption to be 32% by 2030. To help achieve this target, publicly available data on urban planning, use of public services or weather conditions can be cross-checked to create solutions that help make housing more sustainable. One example is Solarmap, which allows the profitability of a solar panel installation to be calculated for a specific location.
• Improving biodiversity: Changes in ecosystems can lead to mass extinctions of species and the limitation of available natural resources, which can affect not only our economy but also our own way of life. In this sense, open data serves as a basis for solutions that, for example, help us monitor various parameters of port waters (such as Environmental Control Panel), improve waste management (Punto limpio) or publicise noise pollution (MAdb).
• Raise awareness of air pollution and the reduction of CO2 emissions. Although, as we saw at the beginning of this article, we Spaniards are very aware of climate change, however, if we look at the individual habits of citizens, we see that there is still much to be done. Only 38% try to reduce their energy consumption, 28% choose less polluting forms of transport, and 36% buy local products. It is therefore necessary to continue raising awareness, for example through indicators of air quality in cities such as GV Aire. There is also a need for applications that promote the use of more efficient means of transport, such as bicycles or public transport (Barcelona metro bus rodalies bici).

You can find more examples in the applications section of datos.gob.es and in our environment section.

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).

Is it possible to find in the data the necessary help to solve the real problems that our society faces? While it is true that data alone cannot be transformed into food for the most disadvantaged, nor can it make weapons disappear in conflict zones or inequalities in the world, they are very useful when it comes to providing information on the causes that cause certain events or situations. Thanks to them, we can better assess the reasons and consequences of these situations, and act so that they do not recur.

Once, thanks to open data, we identify the causes that cause these types of events, we must take one more step: use this information to develop solutions and services that help us solve problems such as, for example, the lack of social inclusion of marginalized groups or inequalities caused by gender, economic or social issues.

When we speak of inclusion, we refer to the process by which both individuals and communities of people, such as migrants, refugees, socially disadvantaged groups or individuals, can interact and integrate in their communities in a satisfactory way and with the same opportunities.

Next, we will see some examples of the importance of open data when creating instruments and services that help the integration of this type of groups, focusing especially on the challenges that our country faces.

Problems related to inequality in Spain and digital solutions based on open data to solve them

Labor insertion

In a context where the health crisis is damaging our economy, it is essential to bring job opportunities closer to citizens. The open publication of job offers and courses, as the Basque Employment Service does through its Lanbide platform, is allowing many job web portals and training centers to add these offers to their catalog easily, promoting their dissemination and , therefore, the labor insertion of job seekers.

Depopulation of rural areas

Currently in Spain it is necessary to make users more visible and aware of the great depopulation problem suffered by some areas of our country, in which its inhabitants have less and less social resources, which sometimes leads to increasing their isolation.

Tool such as "La España Vacía", which consists of a series of interactive maps that show the Spanish demographic evolution, help us to make visible and understand the problem, while platforms such as Plan Repuebla can serve to attract businesses and new inhabitants to areas with lower population density.

Gender inequality 

There are platforms that function as a great channel of awareness and support for women victims of sexist violence, offering testimonies and analysis of the current situation. This is the case of Desprotegides, a portal created in Catalonia that seeks to make visible the serious problem of sexist violence suffered by thousands of women in the world today, in this case with updated data on the number of victims in the Catalan community.

One step further goes the Data COVID Gender project created by the Barcelona Open Data Initiative together with the Gender and ICT group (GENTIC) of the Internet Interdisciplicary Institute (IN3). The project consists of analyzing the impact that gender and occupational segregation have on the prevalence of the coronavirus. It has been one of the 15 proposals chosen by the Catalan Health Quality and Evaluation Agency (Aquas) of the Department of Health to carry out research in data analytics on the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 in Catalonia.

Integration of people with disabilities

In recent years, simple applications that, using open data, provide useful information about the environment. In this article you can find different applications created by companies and citizens, but also public services are working in this regard. As an example, the city of Murcia has launched a free application that allows people with hearing disabilities to receive information about municipal services and carry out the procedures they request by way of videoconference through a smartphone.

Relevant information about the coronavirus for risk groups

Curvaenaragon.com is a web page developed by the Government of Aragon whose main objective is to show updated information on the situation of Covid-19 in the autonomous community, breaking down the data by the different provinces (Huesca, Zaragoza and Teruel).

This website allows all citizens who reside or have to travel to Aragon to consult the evolution of the pandemic in the area, especially for the risk groups that are most vulnerable to this pathology.

In short, there are more and more applications and technologies that, thanks to open data, allow us to obtain useful information about the environment in order to offer solutions to problems such as inequality, disability, poverty or violence, among others.

These are just some examples of applications that use open data to favor the eradication of inequality, but if you know of any other that fulfills a similar function, do not hesitate to register it on our portal or send us an email to contacto@datos.gob.es

Content elaborated by datos.gob.es team.

Now that the call for the third edition of the Aporta Challenge is open, in this occasion focused on the field of education, we have talked to the winner of the 2019 edition, Mariano Nieves, who won thanks to his Optimacis solution. Mariano explained his experience and gave us some advice for this year's participants.

Full interview:

1. What does Optimacis consist of?

Optimacis is a project for the optimisation of the fresh fish market, which seeks to balance prices against monopsony situations.

The success of the project lies in the delivery of value for the three main actors in these markets:

• the fishing companies as producers
• wholesalers and hospitality companies as mediators in the delivery to the market;
• and the fish markets themselves as primary distribution centres.

The values for each actor are specific: in the case of fishermen, by means of advance knowledge of the most advantageous prices for sale; in the case of wholesalers and restaurateurs, by means of knowledge of the supply points with the greatest capacity; and in the case of fish markets, by means of advance knowledge of the expected influx into their facilities, for the internal organisation of resources.

2. What prompted you to participate in the Aporta Challenge?

Without a doubt, the institutional support of datos.gob.es is a reference in the Public Administration, given that the project has a marked character of sustainability for a group that usually requires additional resources to the exploitation.

It was not a preconceived project that came to take advantage of the call. On the contrary, the project was developed after reading the call for proposals. In all honesty, I even asked a formal question at the Red.es website to make sure that fishing was an area covered by the 2019 Aporta Challenge.

I thought that having the recognition and dissemination of the Aporta Challenge would boost my professional career, as it has. This is a value that I want to highlight to encourage other participants in the new call: there are currently many professionals with an impressive career, who can make their CV shine with success in the Aporta Challenge.

3. How was your experience?

The challenge was impressive. For those who know the exciting world of data, I think it is important to stress the importance of handling more than 3,500 predictive models in real time (well, with a 24-hour regeneration cycle).

This is supported by various sources of ingestion, highlighting the information from Meteogalicia and the State Agency of Meteorology, the ingestion in real time from two radar systems (actually, they are called Automatic Identification Systems) located in As Pontes de García Rodríguez and Vigo, and the daily extraction of the price data published from the Galician fish markets.

Shuffling all these sources of information in record time (with seven machines working in continuous mode 24x7), ingesting and monitoring the predictive models was a major effort for me, to which I dedicated the entire summer of 2019. And the months of September and October was dedicated to geolocation and machine learning tasks.

The main advantage that the challenge has given me has been to know sources of large masses of data that are available for projects of all kinds, with the solvency of the sources of the Public Administration.

4. What is the current status of the development of the Optimacis System?

We are already in a phase of promoting the solution, in order to coordinate with public bodies that promote sustainable projects in the field of fisheries at a state, local and regional level. The balance of the market conditions is being a factor that awakens interest in local administrations.

5. What advice would you give to participants in the Aporta 2020 Challenge?

Well, only from my partition experience of course. I think that the dedication and effort were decisive in my case, because the rest of the participants had a very high level to which I could not aspire. Most of them were groups of people, while my participation was of a personal nature. However, the fact that I was able to build this whole block of predictive models and carefully review the results was decisive.

On the other hand, I think it also helped that I took meticulous care of the presentation. The fact that I carefully wrapped the content was well appreciated, as I had a fully functional model.

6. Closing and farewell.

I want to convey all the encouragement to the participants of this call, and not hesitate to include dedication and effort because it is worth it. Not every day you receive recognition from a government institution like datos.gob.es. May the best one win!

Within this technological maelstrom in which we are constantly immersed, every day that passes, humanity is creating a great amount of information that, in many cases, we are unable to deal with.

Public administrations also generate large volumes of information, which they make available to citizens so that we can reuse it from open data portals, but how can we take advantage of this data?

On many occasions, we think that only experts can analyse these large amounts of information, but this is not the case.  In this article we are going to see what opportunities open data presents for users without technical knowledge or experience in data analysis and visualisation.

Generating knowledge in 4 simple steps with a use case

Within the Spanish Government's open data platform, we can find a multitude of data at our disposal. These data are grouped by category, subject, administration that publishes the data, format or with other tags that label us its content.

We can load this data into informational analysis applications, such as PowerBI, Qlik, Tableau, Tipco, Excel, etc., which will help us to create our own graphs and tables with hardly any computer knowledge. The use of these tools will allow us to develop our own informational analysis product, with which we can create filters or unplanned queries. All this without having other computer elements such as databases or ETL tools (Abbreviation of data Extraction, Transformation and Load).

Next we will see how we can build a first dashboard in a very simple way.

1.- Data selection

Before we start collecting meaningless data, the first thing we must decide is for what purpose we will use the data. The datos.gob.es catalogue is very extensive and it is very easy to get lost in this sea of data, so we must focus on the subject matter we are looking for and the administration that publishes it, if we know it. With this simple action we will greatly reduce the scope of our search.

Once we know what to look for, we must focus on the format of the data:

• If we want to collect the information directly to write our doctoral thesis, write an article for a media outlet with statistical data, or simply acquire new knowledge for our own interest, we will focus on taking information that is already prepared and worked on. We should then use data formats such as pdf, html, jpg, docx, etc. These formats will allow us to gather that knowledge without the need for additional technological tools, since the information is served in visual formats, the so-called unstructured formats.
• If we want to work on the information applying different calculation metrics and cross them with other data in our possession, in that case we must use structured information, that is, XLS, CSV, JSON, XML formats.

As an example, let's imagine that we want to analyse the population of each of the districts of the city of Madrid. In this case the dataset we need is the census of the Madrid City Council.

To locate this set of data, we selected Data Catalogue, Demography category, the City Council of Madrid as publisher, the CSV format and I already have the information I need on the right side of the screen. Another simple and complementary way to locate the information is to use the search engine included in the platform and type in "Padrón "+"Madrid".

With this search, the platform offers, among others, two sets of data: the historical census and the census of the last month published. For this example we will take the document corresponding to the August 2020 update.

2.- Loading the information into an information display tool

Many of the information visualisation tools usually have built-in wizards to collect data that can be downloaded from an open data portal. The images in this article are from the Business version of QlikSense (which has a free 30-day trial), but any of the tools mentioned above work in a similar way. With a simple "drag and drop", you will already have the information inside the tool, to start creating indicators and thus generate knowledge.

Most of these tools directly interpret the content of the fields and propose a use for these values, differentiating them by data that can be used as filters, geographical data and data to formulate.

3.- Creation of the first graph or indicator

Now all that remains is to drag the fields on which we want to generate knowledge and create the first indicator on our dashboard. We will drag the field DESC_DISTRITO, which contains the description of the district, to see what happens.

Once the action has been carried out, we see that it has geo-positioned all the districts of Madrid on a map, although at first we do not have any information to analyse. In this first automatic visualization it shows us a point in the centre of the district, but it does not provide us with any other type of additional information.

4.- Creating value in our indicator

Once we have the points on the map, we need to know what we want to see within those points. We will continue with the "Drag and Drop" to count the men and women of Spanish nationality. Let's see what happens...

We see that, for each of the points, the tool has added the citizens by sex in each of the districts where they are registered.

In short, with four simple steps in which we have only selected the set of data and we have dragged and dropped the file into a visualisation tool, we have created the first indicator on our dashboard, where we can continue to generate knowledge.

If we continue to go deeper into the use of these tools, we will be able to create new graphics, such as dynamic tables, pie charts or interactive visualisations.

The interesting thing about this type of analysis is that it allows us to incorporate new sets of open data, such as the number of pharmacies in a district or the number and type of accidents in a particular area. By crossing the different data, we will be able to acquire more knowledge about the city and make informed decisions, such as which is the best area to set up a new pharmacy according to the population or to install a new traffic light.

Content elaborated by David Puig, Graduate in Information and Documentation and responsible for the Master Data and Reference Group at DAMA ESPAÑA

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.

Copernicus is one of the geospatial data programmes that is most in demand and the focus of attention of various organisations, private companies and citizens. The programme is run jointly by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Union through the European Environment Agency, and has two clear objectives: to observe the environment in order to support strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate change, to manage emergencies efficiently and to improve the security of each citizen; and to provide accurate and up-to-date information that is easily accessible to everyone.

The Copernicus programme provides data and information services without restrictions and free of charge on many areas of application thanks to the different technologies used, ranging from satellites in space - including Sentinel satellites - to sensor systems on land, at sea and in the air. Copernicus transforms the data obtained from the satellite into valuable information, thanks to the processing and analysis of the information, its integration with other sources, and the validation of the results.

Through these data, both private and public organisations can create products and services of great economic and social value. The Copernicus programme itself highlights three of these on its website that are linked to our country:

Carbon mapping of forest trees

Agresta S.Coop in collaboration with several Universities of Almeria (Spain) and Delaware (USA), has developed a new methodological approach to improve the national aerial carbon map. The ecosystems of the Iberian Mediterranean area are highly sensitive to climate change and it is therefore essential to monitor and manage organic carbon in these areas. Traditionally, LIDAR technology has been used to measure the carbon density of vegetation, but the data obtained by this means have longer repetition cycles than those provided continuously by satellites. For this reason, programmes such as Copernicus are essential to develop better management of the study area. In this case, thanks to Copernicus Global Land Service it has been possible to integrate the necessary data with high resolution vegetation images, thereby improving the viability and study of the area. 

More information in this fact sheet.

Forest Fire Risk through vegetation stress

At present, forest fires are a constant threat to the ecosystem in Spain, which continues to grow due to the drought that the land suffers as a result of climate change and a decreasing forest control. Monitoring, studying and controlling the state of vegetation and wooded areas through geospatial programmes such as Copernicus is essential to curb fires. Thanks to them, it is possible to know the dryness of the land and the load of inflammable elements in the area. The Castilla-La Mancha Forest Fire Service is working in this direction, using this data for management and decision-making in the forest environment, not only in operational phases but also in emergency situations. 

More information in this fact sheet.

Customs: arrest of drug traffickers

The maritime accesses to Spain and Portugal are strategic entry points for drug smuggling. A large deployment of customs authorities fights every day side by side to stop drug trafficking by investigating the different transit routes already known. Geolocation systems such as Copernicus help in this difficult task. Thanks to the combination of different technologies and available SAR satellites, the search for suspicious vessels at sea becomes less complicated. A real example of use is this joint operation of the National Police and the Tax Agency, which has involved the collaboration of the Portuguese police, the American DEA and the British NCA, where nearly two and a half tonnes of cocaine were intercepted.

More information in this fact sheet.

Other use cases of Copernicus 

In addition to these 3 examples highlighted on Copernicus' own website, there are many more Copernicus' use cases. 

One way to find out more about Copernicus' use cases is to visit Aplicop's website. Aplicop is a project funded by the European Commission, responsible for "disseminating the Copernicus programme, facilitating the use of the programme's products in Spain, and connecting users and providers of the Copernicus ecosystem in Spain". Among other actions, its website collects examples of use cases, through the following form. These examples are shown on a knowledge map, together with other components of the Copernicus ecosystem. 

On ApliCop's website we also find information about upcoming events that promote the construction of services and applications based on Copernicus information services, such as the next Copernicus Hackathon Malaga to be held from 18 September to 3 October in the Andalusian city.

Copernicus continues to drive the reuse of the data it provides

As we have seen, the opportunities for geospatial data to generate benefits for society, the economy and the environment are numerous. The Copernicus programme itself aims to continue promoting the creation of valuable services based on geospatial information, which it provides through different acceleration and incubation programmes. A great opportunity for entrepreneurs and start-ups who want to be part of this interesting ecosystem.

More information about Copernicus

 If you want to know more about the project, you can visit the following links:

• In this article you can find out more about Copernicus' information services and Spain's role in the European Observation Programme.
• In this interview, Nuria Valcárcel, Deputy Director (Territory Observation) of the Subdirectorate General of Geodesy and Cartography, in the D.G. National Geographic Institute (IGN) of the Ministry of Development, the body that represents Spain in the Copernicus Users' Forum, for the monitoring and evolution of the programme, together with the Ministry for Ecological Transition (MITECO), looks in depth at the Copernicus services and highlights other examples of use such as this application for the environmental control of ports developed by NOLOGIN.

Content elaborated by datos.gob.es team.