datos públicos

On 12 September, the deadline ends for companies and entities that have developed projects with public data to submit their projects in the first Aporta Awards in 2017. These awards are focused on divulging and recognising professionals who have opted for reusing open data and innovation as a driving force for digital transformation and who are promoted by the Secretariat of State for the Information Society and the Digital Agenda, the Public Business Entity Red.es and the General Secretariat of Digital Administration.

With this initiative, the aim is to promote and make visible the value of the data generated by the Spanish public administrations, as well as to reuse them. Projects that may qualify for these awards must have been developed in the last two years, reusing public data and contributing to generate social value, new business and/or improvements for society.

Applications will be evaluated during the month of September by representatives from the Aporta Initiative. The originality, utility and impact of the initiative will be considered in terms of beneficiaries. The two best initiatives will receive recognition at the Aporta Conference which will take place at the end of October 2017.

We invite and encourage industry professionals and innovative companies to apply for the Aporta Awards, through the form available on the Red.es website. The deadline is 12 September. Come participate!

All the information is available at dagos.gob.es and in the Terms and Conditions of the 2017 Aporta Awards.

The public procurement reform that has taken place in Europe has incorporated innovation as a new public policy that must be promoted through contractual tools. Although innovation can be understood as a concept that is difficult to pinpoint, the Directive 2014/24 / EU has incorporated a legal definition that helps to define it by indicating that it corresponds to the

introduction of a new or significant product, service or process including, but not limited to, production, building or construction processes, a new marketing method, or a new method of organising business practices, workplace organisation or external relations, among others, with the aim of helping to solve societal challenges or supporting the Europe 2020 Strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.

Innovation in the delivery of services is one of the main challenges currently faced by public entities, especially with regards to the advanced use of technology. In this respect, the release of the data held by them can give companies and society in general the incentive necessary to offer new services or, if necessary, to improve existing ones by offering innovative delivery modalities based on technological innovation.

Moreover, in the context of Open Government, collaboration is one of the pillars on which public policies must be sustained, along with transparency and participation. Consequently, the promotion of open data makes it possible for the private sector to consider collaborating to meet public needs from a new perspective by offering advanced services that focus on data from the public sector.

However, to the extent that such services require public funding, an unexpected difficulty arises which ultimately disincentives the spontaneous predisposition of reusable agents: the need to proceed with the processing of a procurement procedure which, by legal requirement, must be based on the principles of publicity and competition. In this scenario, the reluctance to participate in a competitive and formalised procedure may end up becoming a definitive barrier that, after all, hinders - when it does not directly impede - suggestive and disruptive ideas based on the reuse of public information being converted into innovative services that contribute significant added value.

There are formalised instruments such as the so-called public procurement of innovation solutions (PPI) , which can be of great help in promoting new services based on the release of data from public entities, especially taking into account the interpretative guidelines and criteria that have been issued from the within the EU and by the General State Administration and, also, through the most specialised doctrine on public procurement.

The flexibility demanded by the collaboration inspired by the principles of Open Government needs a broader vision that not only takes this instrument into account but also, in general, the use of the various non-bid contract procedures - with all their legal guarantees, of course, to avoid unacceptable abuses - and, above all, an intelligent promotion action that does not only contemplate economic incentives in the form of direct subsidies. Always bearing in mind that, as it has sought to ensure after the reform of the European Directive on Reuse in 2013 and Spanish legislation in 2015, exclusive agreements will only be admissible under very exceptional circumstances.

The innovative search engine Linknovate and the virtual library Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes have been the two winning projects of the first edition of the Aporta Awards 2017. An initiative promoted by the Secretary of State for the Information Society, Red.es and the General Secretariat of the Digital Administration with the aim of recognizing and disseminating innovative projects developed with public data and to which, in this first edition, 15 candidatures have been submitted. The awards took place on October 24, as the final highlight of the Encuentro Aporta 2017  that in this edition brought together national and international experts in open data under the claim "The value of data in the global ecosystem".

Linknovate, an innovative search engine

Innovative tool oriented to the business sector and focused on helping the search of business data (B2B) efficiently and easily, in a way that favors competitive intelligence and innovation. It is the largest database of science and technology entities, with more than 20 million references (single documents) and more than 2.3 million unique indexed entities (companies and research groups). The data is obtained from open scientific documents (scientific publications, conference proceedings, grants, ...), industrial documents (patents, trademarks, news, corporate websites) and unique information from direct contact with experts. It is as easy to use as a search engine but it provides a discovery experience and facilitates the interpretation of the found data. In the words of Manuel Noya, founding partner and CEO of Linknovate (in the upper left picture), "it is a business intelligence tool with which we help companies to better understand the technologies and emerging markets. But not only that, lso the structuring of data, its visualization, the new technologies and the key players that are behind these new technologies such as internet of things, cybersecurity, virtual reality ... etc ".

 Manuel Noya, CEO of Linknovate: "We have developed a competitive intelligence tool and we help companies to better understand emerging technologies and markets, the structuring of data and its visualization, and we value a type of data with a social component very important which can advance science in a faster way ".

Linknovate works, fundamentally, in competitive intelligence to understand what its competitors are doing and, above all, to identify partners: research groups or companies of interest to reach agreements. "What makes us peculiar," adds Manuel Noya, "is that we value a type of data that has a very important social component which can advance science in a faster way, help companies to have more visibility and connect more easily with each others. " "In the end," concludes Noya, "we help companies not to re-invent the wheel and have a good map of who does what before launching a new product."

Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes-BVMC, a new approach of virtual libraries 

Developed by the Fundación Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, the main objective of data.cervantesvirtual.com is to improve the data quality, access and reuse of its funds, based on internationally recognized standards aimed at digital environments such as RDA. With a dynamic approach and constant open innovation, it seeks to improve the user experience and also promote the use of open data by the community, participating in congresses and publishing in scientific journals.

Manuel Bravo, general director of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Foundation: "our virtual library is the pioneering project in digital libraries, we started to share and create a library on the Internet, accessible to all, and with a collaborative approach from the start. BVMC is now a reference space that brings together technology and humanities. "

Data.cervantesvirtual.com, in comparison with traditional systems, offers a novel user experience allowing browsing bibliographic records through their properties and relationships such as, for example, the language, most relevant dates, authors and the role they play in the works, editions, translations and formats. For more expert users, the interface includes a SPARQL access point, enabling the execution of any type of query against the repository. Manuel Bravo, general director of the Virtual Foundation Miguel de Cervantes, (in the image above right) noted that "our virtual library is possibly the pioneering project in digital libraries, we were born in the year 98, when the Internet was not what it is today, with a dimension in Spanish and in Latin America and also in Europe, we started to share and create a library on the Internet, accessible to everyone and with a collaborative silvering from the start ". The BVMC has become one of the great examples of the transfer of knowledge from the university to society in the humanities area. "We have become - said Bravo - in a space that brings together technology and humanities, a reference space that also allows not only researchers but teachers, educators, to reuse data to create educational materials, to the general public because it can access to the best digital books of the Spanish language and the classics of Spanish and Iberian America, and we have also become an example of how to disseminate culture, respecting copyrights and intellectual property rights, and at the same time be a high-level technological project. " "All our development is done in open source and it was decisive to talk about open data," concluded the general director of the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Foundation.

In the context of libraries, open data is playing a very important role as regards visibility and access. Initiatives and international organizations such as Wikidata and BBC have placed their focus on the BVMC. The Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library Foundation was established in 2000. Its Board of Trustees is chaired by Mario Vargas Llosa (Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010), its vice-president is the Rector of the University of Alicante and Mario Benedetti is Patron of Honor since June 2009. The Foundation manages the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, the Vargas Llosa Chair and the Impact Digitalization Competence Center.

Data analysis helps all types of entities and public and private organizations to make better evidence-based decisions more quickly and effectively. In today’s world, this area is constantly evolving: more and more data is available and its momentum continues to grow, playing a vital role in business and policy decision-making around the world.

The Big Data Analytics for Policy Making report, drawn up by the Directorate-General for Informatics (DG DIGIT) of the European Commission, addresses Big Data and data analysis initiatives launched by public authorities, paying special attention to the potential or added value that these contribute to the different levels of government or the different areas of action.

This extensive and well-documented dossier puts together just how data analysis is used in the public sector and how many organizations approach the challenge of obtaining value from data. It collects and analyzes more than a hundred cases -103 to be exact- in which public administrations use and apply data analysis in the policy field (from policy planning and design to implementation, evaluation and review), and that show the possibilities that come with the use of diverse sources of data (administrative data, sensor data, social media, etc.) and analytical techniques (predictive, descriptive, visualization, etc.).

The cases analyzed and documented have been grouped into five areas (strategy, people and skills, processes, data and technology); and around five main categories of initiatives: general eGovernment initiatives, studies (university research and feasibility studies), open data portals, applied cases and training. A selection that includes key elements such as the different areas of policy (security, justice, domestic, health…), the level of government (supranational initiatives such as the United Nations and OECD, national, regional and local), types of data sources (business data applications, public web, social media, records -both human and machine generated- and sensors), as well as types of analysis (descriptive, predictive or prescriptive).

Along with the role of big data and its analysis in policy making, the DIGIT Directorate-General of the European Commission defines the concepts that are related to big data, presents its characteristics and challenges, and proposes that the traditional architecture of business intelligence is no longer sufficient when it comes to addressing Big Data.

Of the hundred analyzed examples, the report selects the ten most relevant cases of data analysis in the public sector:

1. UNECE Sandbox (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe).
2. Statistics from the Netherlands on Innovation and Big Data
3. Flanders Education (Department of Education and Training of the Flemish Government)
4. Data Consumption Index (ISTAT-the Italian National Institute of Statistics)
5. Transport Data Analysis from London (Transport for London – TfL)
6. Danish Ministry of Health
7. Flanders Employment Service – Innovative Data Analytics
8. Analysis of Customs, Lithuania
9. Taxes and Customs, Estonia
10. The National Archives of the United Kingdom – Big Data for the Law

The report concludes by compiling the best practices and shared knowledge on the application of data analysis to policy, and it proposes a series of recommendations for governments and public organizations that work with analytical data and big data:

• “A public organization must be involved in the era of big data analytics”: think and dialogue with key figures in the organization regarding the potential for optimizing, redefining and transforming the data analytics initiatives.
• “Treat data as crown jewels”: invest in knowledge that is related to ways of managing information and data.
• “No one can whistle a symphony, it takes an orchestra to play it”: there is a need to combine technical skills with business skills in order to face the challenges of big data.
• “The technology you use, impresses no one: the experience you create with it, is everything”: design scalable and flexible IT architectures prepared to adapt to multidisciplinary agents and a continuous technological evolution.
• “It’s not a destination, it’s a journey”: maturity in this area is considered a journey with multiple challenges and designing a detailed road map is important in order to face them.
• “Interoperability challenges must be addressed”: understand that the management of information and metadata are not only important within my organization.
• “Always keep a strong focus on what truly matters”: consider the analysis of big data as a relevant area in which administrations will obtain a huge benefit by collaborating with other public or private entities.

It also points out that the large number of suppliers of different technologies, both open source and proprietary, is a challenge for public organizations when it comes to building an ICT architecture. 

The European Union has just made public a paper that, several years of the 2013 reform bring in force, proposes how to tackle overcoming the barriers and difficulties that have been detected since. Recognising the important advance that has taken place over the last few years, the Commission highlights that it there is still a significant number of obstacles, in the context of the Digital Single Market Strategy 

With it a process of reflection and evaluation has started that aims to prepare an initiative on accessibility and re-using public information that will be launched over the next few months. It is a revision that, ultimately, each State has to develop according to internal regulations. Only in this way will it be possible to check to what extent these obstacles are truly present in their own context and they could be hampering the effective re-use of public sector information. What are the barriers that are identified in this working paper? 

Regarding the limitations to the subjective scope, the European Commission warns for the need to extend the enforcement of re-use regulations which are projected under three parts:

• Private-legal bodies, at times with a status that gives them autonomy or a certain independence, that they have delegated the execution of their own activities from the public sector. This would be the case of those subjects who, even being under the control or public funding, are a company of foundational nature. But also the bodies with public-legal status that do not concur the demands from article 2.d) of Law 37/2017, that is, that they have been created to satisfy the needs of public interest that are of an industrial or commercial nature.
• The private-legal subjects that, however, carry out a public service activity in name of the administration holder, for example the concessionaries. In relation to these, it should be considered how the information would be accessed directly in their power from the demands and principles of open data. 
• The European Commission considers the possibility of extending regulation to certain data of strictly private subjects, at least when this possibility can result in improving the functioning of policies and public services, expressly citing the case of the Government Statistics Act.

In relation to the conditions to access the information, they highlight three high impact issues on the possibilities of subsequent re-use:

•  It stresses the need to advance the provision of data in real time according to recognised standards. The practical reality of managing documents in the public sector has still not been achieved - except for the highlighted exceptions - the expected level of modernising technology, in a way where the use of paper still enjoys an undeniable implementation.
• From the point of view of the cost to re-users, the 2013 Directive and the transposition in Spain of the rules related to the cost during the 2015 reform involved an important advance in highlighting that the tariffs should be limited “to marginal costs that are incurred for their reproduction, provision and distribution”. The Commission has noted that there is an extended practice that tends to require very high amounts. As anticipated, the Considered 28 of the cited reform of the RISP Directive in 2013, is essential to reinforce guarantees in terms of administrative complaints to effectively and efficiently control the decision adopted by public bodies without needing to raise a long and costly legal process.
• Regarding licences, through those that specify the conditions for re-use, it is emphasised that the diversity of licences clearly cause difficulty which should be addressed in terms of a greater interoperability in legal terms of the conditions considered.

Finally, the European Commission considers to expand the objective scope of regulation on re-use to a strategical scope: the research activity. It is a significant challenge as there is an undeniable plurality of conflicting interests at play, both at an individual level of researchers and institutionally, in terms of the research agencies and funding bodies. 

Despite the important regulatory advances produced over recent years, it is clear that the issue of the legal aspects of re-using information linked to the public sector is not definitively closed, not even after the 2013 reform. Over the next few years we are compelled to reform legislation at a European and state level and to weigh up multiple and different legitimate interests that will not always be aligned.

The seventh edition of the Aporta Meeting will be held next October 24, and this year has as its motto "The value of data in the global ecosystem", in which experts in open data, both national and international, will describe their views regarding the publication of public sector data and its reuse.

The meeting, open to all, will be organized in morning and afternoon sessions with round tables, talks and presentations. In the afternoon, as the final act of the conference, the Aporta awards will be given (aimed at recognizing the best experiences already completed in reuse of public data), as well as the awards to the winners of the Aporta Challenge (ideas, applications , solutions and/or services that use and reuse public data contributing to an improvement of efficiency in public administrations in Spain).

The event, which will also have various pre-events of a sectoral nature on the previous days, is organized by Red.es in collaboration with the Ministries of Energy, Tourism and Digital Agenda, and Finance and Public Function.

Under the slogan "The value of data in the global ecosystem", the Aporta Meeting this year celebrates its seventh edition. It will take place on 24 October, organized by Red.es in collaboration with the Ministries of Energy, Tourism and Digital Agenda, and Finance and Public Service.

Experts on open data, both Spanish and international,  will present their views on the publication of public sector data and reuse.

The meeting will be split into morning and afternoon sessions and will feature various sectoral pre-events to be held on the days before the meeting.

This seventh edition has been structured around three thematic blocks. The first will consist of a panel discussion on the value of open data. Several speakers will present practical experiences aimed at showing how proper exploitation of data has a clear socio-economic impact, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Developments in the international context of policies on the reuse of public sector data constitute the second thematic block, which will be attended by representatives of those international organizations which are considered as a benchmark in this area, such as the European Commission and the OECD.

The third thematic block will address the development of new technologies related to data, such as, notably, the internet of things or natural language processing, and all of which should be taken into account due to their potential and projection in the field of Public sector data and reuse.

In the evening, to draw the conference to a close, the conclusions of the different pre-events held in the days before the Aporta Meeting will be presented and the the presentation ceremony will also take place of the Aporta Awards (aimed at recognizing the best experiences already completed in reuse of public data), as well as the awards to the winners of the Aporta Challenge (ideas, applications, solutions and/or services that use and reuse public data contributing to improved efficiency of public administrations in Spain).

We encourage everyone in the open data community to set aside the 24 October as a date to participate, discuss and share experiences in the Aporta 2017 Meeting.