Last October, the Aporta Initiative, together with the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence and Red.es, launched the third edition of the Aporta Challenge. Under the slogan "The value of data in digital education", the aim was to reward ideas and prototypes capable of identifying new opportunities to capture, analyse and use data intelligence in the development of solutions in the field of education.

Among the proposals submitted in Phase I, there were a wide range of entries. From individuals to university academic teams, educational institutions and private companies, which have devised web platforms, mobile applications and interactive solutions with data analytics and machine learning techniques as protagonists.

A jury of renowned prestige has been in charge of evaluating the proposals submitted based on a series of public criteria. The 10 solutions selected as finalists are:

EducaWood

• Team: Jimena Andrade, Guillermo Vega, Miguel Bote, Juan Ignacio Asensio, Irene Ruano, Felipe Bravo and Cristóbal Ordóñez.

What is it?

EducaWood is a socio-semantic web portal that allows to explore the forest information of an area of the Spanish territory and to enrich it with tree annotations. Teachers can propose environmental learning activities contextualized to their environment. Students carry out these activities during field visits by means of tree annotations (location and identification of species, measurements, microhabitats, photos, etc.) through their mobile devices. In addition, EducaWood allows virtual field visits and remote activities with the available forestry information and annotations generated by the community, thus enabling its use by vulnerable groups and in Covid scenarios.

EducaWood uses sources such as the Spanish Forest Map, the National Forest Inventory or GeoNames, which have been integrated and republished as linked open data. The annotations generated by the students' activities will also be published as linked open data, thus contributing to community benefit.

Data Education. Innovation and Human Rights.

• Team: María Concepción Catalán, Asociación Innovación y Derechos Humanos (ihr.world).

What is it?

This proposal presents a data education web portal for students and teachers focused on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Its main objective is to propose to its users different challenges to be solved through the use of data, such as 'What were women doing in Spain in 1920' or 'How much energy is needed to maintain a farm of 200 pigs'.

This initiative uses data from various sources such as the UN, the World Bank, Our World in Data, the European Union and each of its countries. In the case of Spain, it uses data from datos.gob.es and INE, among others.

UniversiDATA-Lab

• Team: Rey Juan Carlos University, Complutense University of Madrid, Autonomous University of Madrid, Carlos III University of Madrid and DIMETRICAL The Analytics Lab S.L.

What is it?

UniversiDATA-Lab is a public and open portal whose function is to host a catalog of advanced and automatic analyses of the datasets published in the UniversiDATA portal, and which is the result of the collaborative work of universities. It arises as a natural evolution of the current "laboratory" section of UniversiDATA, opening the scope of potential analysis to all present and future datasets/universities, in order to improve the aspects analysed and encourage universities to be laboratories of citizenship, providing a differential value to society.

All the datasets that universities are publishing or will publish in UniversiDATA are potentially usable to carry out in-depth analyses, always considering the respect for the protection of personal data. The specific sources of the analyses will be published on GitHub to encourage the collaboration of other users to contribute improvements.

LocalizARTE

• Team: Pablo García, Adolfo Ruiz, Miguel Luis Bote, Guillermo Vega, Sergio Serrano, Eduardo Gómez, Yannis Dimitriadis, Alejandra Martínez and Juan Ignacio Asensio.

What is it?

This web application pursues the learning of art history through different educational environments. It allows students to visualize and perform geotagged tasks on a map. Teachers can propose new tasks, which are added to the public repository, as well as select the tasks that may be more interesting for their students and visualize the ones they perform. On the other hand, a mobile version of LocalizARTE will be developed in the future, in which the user will need to be close to the place where the tasks are geotagged in order to perform them.

The open data used in the first version of LocalizARTE comes from the list of historical monuments of Castilla y León, DBpedia, Wikidata, Casual Learn SPARQL and OpenStreetMap.

Study PISA data and datos.gob.es

• Team: Antonio Benito, Iván Robles and Beatriz Martínez.

What is it?

This project is based on the creation of a dashboard that allows to view information from the PISA report, conducted by the OECD, or other educational assessments along with data provided by datos.gob.es of socioeconomic, demographic, educational or scientific scope. The objective is to detect which aspects favour an increase in academic performance using a machine learning model, so that effective decision-making can be carried out. The idea is that schools themselves can adapt their educational practices and curricula to the learning needs of students to ensure greater success.

This application uses various open data from  INE, the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training or PISA Spain.

Big Data in Secondary Education... and Secondary in Education

• Team: Carmen Navarro, Nazaret Oporto School.

What is it?

This proposal pursues two objectives: on the one hand, to improve the training of secondary school students in digital skills, such as the control of their digital profiles on the Internet or the use of open data for their work and projects. On the other hand, the use of data generated by students in an e-learning platform such as Moodle to determine patterns and metrics to personalize learning. All of this is aligned with the SDGs and the 20-30 Agenda.

Data used for its development come from the WHO and the datathon "Big Data in the fight against obesity", where several students proposed measures to mitigate global obesity based on the study of public data.

DataLAB: the Data Lab in Education

• Team: iteNlearning, Ernesto Ferrández Bru.

What is it?

Data obtained with empirical Artificial Intelligence techniques such as big data or machine learning offer correlations, not causes. iteNleanring bases its technology on scientific models with evidence, as well as on data (from sources such as INE or the Basque Institute of Statistics - Eustat). These data are curated in order to assist teachers in decision making, once DataLAB identifies the specific needs of each student.

DataLAB Mathematics is a professional educational tool that, based on neuropsychological and cognitive models, measures the level of neurodevelopment of the specific cognitive processes developed by each student. This generates an educational scorecard that, based on data, informs us of the specific needs of each person (high ability, dyscalculia...) so that they can be enhanced and/or reinforced, allowing an evidence-based education.

The value of podcasting in digital education

• Team: Adrián Pradilla Pórtoles and Débora Núñez Morales.

What is it?

2020 has been the year in which podcasts have taken off as a new digital format for the consumption of different areas of information. This idea seeks to take advantage of the boom of this tool to use it in the educational field so that students can learn in a more enjoyable and different way.

The proposal includes the official syllabus of secondary or university education, as well as competitive examinations, which can be obtained from open data sources and official websites. Through natural language processing technologies, these syllabi are associated with existing audios of teachers on history, English, philosophy, etc. on platforms such as iVoox or Spotify, resulting in a list of podcasts by course and subject.

The data sources used for this proposal include the Public Employment Offer of Castilla La Mancha or the educational competences in different stages.

MIPs Project

• Team: Aday Melián Carrillo, Daydream Software.

What is it?

A MIP (Marked Information Picture) is a new interactive information tool, consisting of a series of interactive layers on static images that facilitate the retention of information and the identification of elements.

This project consists of a service for creating MIPs quickly and easily by manually drawing regions of interest on any image imported through the web. The created MIPs will be accessible from any device and have multiple applications as a teaching, personal and professional resource.

In addition to manual creation, the authors have implemented an automatic GeoJSON to MIP data converter in Python. As a first step, they have developed a MIP of Spanish provinces from this public database.

FRISCHLUFT

• Team: Harut Alepoglian and Benito Cuezva, German School Cultural Association, Zaragoza.

What is it?

The Frischluft (Fresh Air) project is a hardware and software solution for measuring environmental parameters in the school. It aims to improve the thermal comfort of the classrooms and increase the protection of the students through intelligent ventilation, while consolidating a tractor project that drives the digital transformation of the school.

This proposal uses data sources from Zaragoza City Council on CO2 levels in the urban environment of the city and international data repositories to measure global emissions, which are compared through statistical techniques and machine learning models.

Next steps

All of these ideas have been able to capture how to best use data intelligence to develop real solutions in the education sector. The finalists now have 3 months to develop a prototype. The three prototypes that receive the best evaluation from the jury, according to the established evaluation criteria, will be awarded 4,000, 3,000 and 2,000 euros respectively.

Good luck to all participants!

You can now meet the Jury of the third edition of the Aporta Challenge. The name of the people in charge of evaluating the ideas and prototypes received has just been published in the Electronic headquarters of Red.es and on our web page datos.gob.es.

The jury is made up of representatives of Public Administrations, organizations linked to the digital economy and academia, both from the ICT field and from sectors linked to issues associated with the educational field. Next, we reveal his identity to you.

Companies

The Aporta Challenge Jury has 5 representatives from leading companies in the technology sector, with great knowledge of the use of data to generate valuable products and services.

• Belén Gancedo Riestra. Director of Education at Microsoft Ibérica, a company that not only offers solutions for the educational field, but has also made open datasets available to users.

• Carles Suero Marqués. Corporate Director of Education at Grupo SM, one of the largest publishers in the world, of Spanish origin, specialized in the publication of educational materials, but also in the development of comprehensive solutions focused on 3 axes: strategic support, personalized learning and comprehensive management of the centers.

• Cristina Torvisco Tinoco. Specialist Consultant at Telefónica Educación Digital, the Telefónica group company that develops comprehensive online learning solutions for education and training.

• Gonzalo Romero Garnica. Director of Education of Google Spain. Google has opted for the opening of accessible datasets through APIs and the development of tools that facilitate their use by users. Among its areas of work is Google for Education, with solutions designed for teachers and students.

• Juan Núñez Colás. Managing Partner of Otbinnova Creative Thinking, a company specialized in pedagogical innovation processes that offers services to educational organizations, educational centers and content companies.

Associations and foundations

In addition to the business field, the jury is also made up of representatives of associations linked to the field of data-based technological innovation.

•  Ainara Zubillaga del Río. Director of Education and Training of the Cotec Foundation for Innovation, a non-profit organization that carries out various projects in the field of education.

•  Antonio Cimorra Lanchas. Director of Information Technologies and Digital Agenda of Ametic (Multisectoral Association of Information Technology, Communications and Electronics Companies), an employer association that represents companies of all sizes linked to the digital industry.

• Javier Miranda Gil. Head of the Training, Education and Employment Area of ​​DigitalES, the Spanish Association for Digitization whose objective is to promote digital transformation through different lines of work such as education, and new employment models.

• Olga Quirós Bonet. General Secretary of ASEDIE (Multisectoral Information Association), which brings together infomediary companies, that is, companies focused on the reuse and distribution of information for value-added products.

Educational entities

How could it be otherwise, a space has also been reserved for educational centers:

• Fernando Díaz de Marí. Deputy Director of Engineering in Science and Data Engineering at the Carlos III University of Madrid, an entity that has an attractive training offer in data, both in undergraduate and graduate degrees.

• Nacho de Pinedo Palomero. Founder and CEO of the Instituto Superior para el Desarrollo de Internet, a digital native business school, with a wide range of distance programs in Spanish and English.

Public administration

Finally, representatives of public administrations that are part of the data-based innovation ecosystem have also been invited:

• Antonio Fernández Ezker. Deputy Director General of Talent and Digital Entrepreneurship of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation.

• Antonio Ibáñez Pascual. Head of the Transparency and Information Reuse Service of the General Directorate of Transparency and Good Governance of the Junta de Castilla y León, one of the organizations most committed to open data at the regional level.

• Carlos Medina Bravo. Director of the INTEF (National Institute of Educational Technologies and Teacher Training), the unit of the Ministry of Education and Professional Training responsible for the integration of ICT and Teacher Training in non-university educational stages. UPDATE: In June 2020 Carlos Medina Bravo has been replaced by Julio Albalad Gimeno, as a member of the jury for the final of the Desafío due to internal changes in INTEF.

The Secretary of the Jury, with voice and vote, will be Sonia Castro García-Muñoz, Coordinator of the Aporta Initiative in the Directorate of Digital Public Services of Red.es.

You can see all the members of the jury in the following visual:

Registration for the challenge contributes is still open

If you want to participate in the Aporta Challenge, you are still on time. You just have to present an original idea to drive improvements in the educational field using data intelligence, through the Red.es electronic office before November 18 at 1:00 p.m.

Based on the jury's assessment, the 10 best ideas will go to the second phase of the Challenge and they will have 3 months to develop a prototype of the solution. At the end of the process, three winners will be chosen, who will be awarded € 4,000, € 3,000 and 2,000% respectively.

More information in this link.

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!

The Aporta Challenge, in line with many other initiatives promoted by public administrations, could not be unaware of the great challenges we are facing in this year 2020. For this reason, its third edition, while fulfilling its usual objective of promoting the use of data and related technologies, aims to contribute to solving problems related to digital education. Without doubt, this is one of the areas in which the need to propose new innovations to ensure that the pandemic does not cause serious damage to the potential of the younger generations has been most evident.

With the slogan "The value of data in digital education", datos.gob.es is proposing an Aporta Challenge that in 2020 reward ideas and prototypes that identify new opportunities for capturing, analysing and using the intelligence of data in the development of solutions for the educational sphere at any of its stages.

Identifying a problem

If we were to approach participation in the challenge as a data science project, the first thing we would do is determine the question we would like to solve, in short, choose a problem worth working on.  In this article we propose some lines of work, but they are not restrictions, they are only intended to serve as inspiration to make it easier for us to choose an educational challenge with a great impact. We must always aspire to improve the world.

On the other hand, we can look at the large educational gaps defined by the Educa en Digital programme, which aims to complement the Digitalisation and Digital Skills Plan and to promote the digital transformation of education in Spain, making intensive use of ICT both in the classroom and in non-presential formats, and tackling specific problems thanks to developments linked to data and artificial intelligence. For each of the specific objectives we can think of a good number of issues on which we can work:

1. The provision of digital educational devices and resources. For example, how can we help ensure that access to technology is not a barrier to access to education, especially for the most vulnerable groups? how can we reduce the requirements for accessing educational programmes remotely? how can we rely on the most economical devices that are most widely available to students? etc.
2. The provision of digital educational resources, especially in relation to the previous point. On many occasions the problem we can work on does not have to be completely new, but we can find a more efficient approach to an apparently resolved issue.  For example, how can we help a teacher to better monitor a large number of students? how can we improve the security of the applications used by students through public networks? how can we guarantee the privacy of students? etc.
3. The adequacy of teachers' digital skills. In this line there are also a significant number of questions to be resolved: how can we improve the usability of tools for teachers and students? how can we promote skills related to collaboration or communication when people are not in the same physical space? how can we help STEM skills to be perceived as transversal? etc.
4. The application of artificial intelligence to personalised education, which is almost a holy grail of Education. How can we create personalised learning paths for each group of students, or better still, optimising the learning pace of each student according to their individual characteristics? how can we predict the impact of changes in programmes on the evolution of group or student learning? how can we detect and avoid gender bias in models that work on any of the above problems?

In short, with the suggestions published in the bases and a little research, it is easy to locate a good number of issues on which we can do our bit to improve digital education. Without forgetting our own experience. We have all been at least students, and perhaps also teachers, at some point.

Examining the prior art

Before we begin our work, we must consider that it is very likely that, with or without success, others have identified and proposed solutions to the problem we have chosen. From their success or failure, we can also draw lessons so reviewing the state of the art is key to focusing our project well. In relation to educational technology it is interesting to review resources such as

• The activity of educational technology start-ups in repositories such as EU-startups or the WISE accelerator.
• Awards focused on educational technology such as the prestigious Global Learning XPRIZE or the WISE Prize for Education.
• The list of more than 2.500 educational innovation projects from around the world contained in the Leapfrogging Inequality: Remaking Education to Help Young People Thrive.
• The solutions that reuse open data in the area of education and that highlight portals such as the European data portal or datos.gob.es.

As you will see, many of the projects are focused on solving problems that are mostly present in countries less developed than ours. However, the pandemic has changed the rules of the game from what we could have foreseen and is challenging us again with problems that under normal circumstances we would consider to be overcome.

Locating datasets

Open data is present in almost every problem that is solved by data related technologies and it is usually one ingredient, not the only one. The foundations of the Aporta Challenge reflect this reality and impose very few restrictions on creators, using data sources listed in datos.gob.es is not even mandatory, despite being the driving force behind the challenge. At least one set of data generated by the public administrations must be used, but it can come from any source and can play any role within the project.

To locate data related to our project we can start with the more than 1,700 datasets of the datos.gob.es data catalogue, which federates a good part of the data available in Spanish portals. In the European Data Portal we can find more than 8,000 datasets related to education from all EU countries and another 3,000 datasets from the catalogue of the European Union open data portal.

International institutions that work for the development of education such as UNICEF or the World Bank also have open data catalogues in which we can locate resources that help us in some part of our project.

The Google dataset search engine, the AWS open data registry or the Microsoft Azure datasets are resources in which we can also find datasets to enrich any data-based project.

The data catalogue of institutions such as the US Government's Institute of Education Sciences, which although focused on the United States, undoubtedly contains data of great value for measuring and understanding the impact of initiatives developed to improve education and which can enrich many projects.

Another option that we should bear in mind is that it may not be enough to solve the problem we have chosen to clean up, reconcile and transform datasets from any of the sources that are publicly and openly available. Sometimes we need to work on generating or building our own dataset. And in that case a very good option is to make it publicly and openly available so that it can be reused and improved by others.

Defining the product

Finally, we have to think about the best way to deliver the result of our work so that it can be used by its recipients and have the impact we want. The options are multiple and again the bases do not impose restrictions. Some possibilities could be:

• Mobile Apps: The enormous penetration of the iOS and Android platforms means that any product we build for these platforms and publish in their respective stores is guaranteed to have a huge potential diffusion. In addition, there are options to carry out multiplatform developments and even to carry out developments with little (low-code) or no (non-code) software development knowledge.
• Websites: Web applications are probably still the most common mechanism for making a project of any kind available to society in general. The advances in managed services of the large cloud providers and the facilities they offer to make infrastructure available for free mean that it has never been easier to start a project. It is also possible to use non-code platforms such as appypie or low-code platforms such as Appian to reduce the initial barrier if we do not have a software developer on the team.
• Artificial Intelligence Algorithms: It is increasingly common for a data-based project to be delivered in the form of an automatic learning model or artificial intelligence. For example, Amazon AWS offers the possibility to list algorithms like Microsoft Azure in its Machine Learning Marketplace so that they can be consumed by other applications.
•  Stories and Visualizations: Sometimes the best way to deliver results is through a visualization or a DataStory that allows you to communicate the result of your work. For this purpose, there are multiple options that range from the utilities that incorporate most of the generic Business Intelligence tools such as Tableau to others specialised in spatial location such as the Spanish Carto.

We wish all participants good luck and encourage you to work on a challenge that has a great impact on society.

Content prepared by Jose Luis Marín, Senior Consultant in Data, Strategy, Innovation & Digitalization.

The contents and points of view reflected in this publication are the sole responsibility of its author.

One more year, the Aporta Initiative launches the Aporta Challenge, a competition aimed at promoting the creation of solutions based on public sector information, which help solve challenges in specific sectors that affect society as a whole. This time, the chosen sector is education.

A teaching model based on data and disruptive technologies

The current context of a global pandemic has marked a before and after in the education sector. Although there has been talk for years about the benefits of incorporating new technologies in the teaching-learning process, in what has come to be called Edtech, this trend has become even more necessary in the new post-COVID-19 educational ecosystem.

Edtech refers to all kinds of digital or technological innovations that aim to improve education. This will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the sector and promote more universal access to knowledge. A field where open data has great potential, as the European Union clearly states. Open data can serve as the basis for solutions that drive automated and personalized online processes based on disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, while promoting greater effectiveness and inclusion, and helping to meet sustainable development goals.

Under the conviction that digital technology enriches learning in a wide variety of ways and offers new opportunities, the European Commission itself launched the Digital Education Action Plan. Among other issues, said plan highlights the importance of promoting innovation in the sector by holding hackathons aimed at developing solutions that respond to the main challenges in education.

Challenges to solve in the Challenge Aporta 2020

In this context, the new edition of the Aporta Challenge is being developed, which seeks original ideas and prototypes that provide new opportunities to capture, analyze and use data intelligence in the development of solutions in the educational field. These solutions can be aimed at solving challenges such as the following:

• Encourage more effective teaching and improve students' experience in the learning process from home or the classroom. Address the growing need for personalized education and identify mechanisms that contribute to responding to the evaluation of learning in non-face-to-face digital environments.
• Promote the dissemination of teaching-learning experiences among the educational community.
• Accelerate the development of skills in teaching professionals to ensure that students learn more and better, in addition to reinforcing the learning of skills related to data analysis and emerging technologies.
• Make learning more attractive and help solve behavior or inattention problems of students.
• Facilitate student tutoring and improve decision-making.
• Respond to Internet security and / or data privacy problems.
• Improve the efficiency and effectiveness in the management of students, educational resources, institutions, etc.
• Introduce students to STEM fields and encourage their training in these subjects.
• Devise solutions aimed at reinforcing the prestige and social recognition of the teaching function.

How does the Aporta 2020 Challenge work?

The Aporta Challenge is developed in 2 phases:

Phase I: Ideas competition

Participants must present an original idea, developed specifically for this contest, and that responds to the proposed theme. The ideas and prototypes that are presented must use at least one data source generated by the Public Administrations, whether national or international. Additionally, its use can be combined with data sets exposed by other sources, public or private.

The ideas presented will be evaluated by the jury based on 5 criteria:

• Relevance
• Quality and overall clarity of the proposed idea
• Impact on the improvement of the educational system of the proposed idea
• Sources of utility
• Promotion of the quality of life of vulnerable groups

The 10 ideas with the highest score will go to phase 2.

Phase II: Prototype development and face-to-face exhibition

The authors of the 10 selected ideas will develop a prototype associated with the proposed idea. From the moment they communicate their pass to phase 2, participants will have a minimum period of 3 months to develop the prototype. A functional exemplification or simulation is sought that allows some interaction, a visualization or a multimedia solution that allows the proposal to be exemplified in a tangible prototype.

The three best prototypes will be selected according to the assessment of the established criteria:

• Easy to use
• Technical quality of the prototype
• Viability

What do the winning teams get?

The three selected prototypes will receive the following financial award:

• First classified: € 4,000
• Second place: € 3,000
• Third place: € 2,000

What do I have to do to participate?

The Aporta Challenge is aimed at individuals and legal entities from the European Union, who can participate individually or in teams.

Those interested in participating must submit their idea through this form at the Red.es website before November 18 at 1:00 p.m.

To present the idea, it is necessary to have an electronic certificate, so it is recommended not to rush the established deadline. Our support team will be at your disposal for any questions that may arise in the email desafio_aporta@datos.gob.es.

More information in the bases of the Challenge Aporta 2020.

If you want to contribute to getting this information to others, we offer you materials that will make it easier for you:

• Promotional materials
• Promotional video

The Aporta Challenge 2019 has come to an end. On December 17, the 10 finalists, chosen among the 40 ideas submitted in May, showed the jury the prototypes they have been preparing for the last months.

After a difficult deliberation, due to the high quality of the works presented, the jury selected the three winners based on three criteria: ease of use, technical quality of the prototype and viability of the solution.

First place went to Optimacis, a solution that offers an objective assessment of the prices of the fish caught. Through machine learning technologies, Optimacis predicts the demand for fish in each fish market. In this way, fishermen can make real-time decisions about the species to be captured, rationalizing the fishing grounds and improving their sustainability. This information is also useful to fishermen for redirecting their sale to the most profitable markets based on auction prices for the species they have just caught.

Optimacis adds currently dispersed raw data, which comes mainly from 3 sources: the characteristics of the fleet which operates in the fishing grounds, the meteorological factor in the geographical area of the fishing grounds and other socio-demographic factors associated with consumers. The service has been devised by Mariano Luis Nieves, who presented the project to the jury.

Mariano Luis Nieves, presenting Optimacis

The second place went to ChoperApp, a web platform to estimate the volume of poplars at a local scale in La Rioja, but which can be exported to other regions of the Ebro and the Duero Basin.

Choperas have a fundamental economic role in rural areas of Spain. Specifically, in La Rioja, they represent more than 50% of the value of the wood that is sold every year, despite representing 1.5% of the forest area. Using data from the LIDARA PNOA of the National Geographic Institute and Copernicus, Chopperapp quantifies forest resources in real time. It is an idea of Agresta Coop that was explained by Jose Luis Tomé.

Jose Luis Tomé, showing the functionalities of Chopperapp

The third place went to Ecoveo, an open license website that shows on a map more than 36,000 ecological agri-food operators. Its objective is to standardize the available data of said producers to promote transparency in the sector and facilitate contact between consumers, producers and companies, facilitating the purchase of proximity products.

Ecoveo uses information from the certifiers themselves authorized by each Autonomous Community, and datasets such as the Registry of organic food producers in Castilla La Mancha, or different datasets from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food and Environment. Ana María Bello defended the idea, developed in collaboration with Antonio Pichardo.

Ana María Bello, explaining what Ecoveo is

The three winners will receive 4,000, 3,000 and 2,000 euros respectively. You can learn more about these 3 projects in social media by following the hashtag #optimacis, #Chopperapp and #MapaEcoveo; and discover the rest of the finalist projects in this link.

Congratulations to the 3 winners and all the participants for the great work done during the whole Aporta Challenge 2019!

We invite all companies that have successfully carried out projects with reusable data generated by Spanish public administrations to submit their application for the Aporta Awards. 

The Aporta Awards 2017, an initiative promoted by the State Secretariat for the Information Society and Digital Agenda, the Public Enterprise Body Red.es and the General Secretariat for Digital Government, have been created with the aim of disseminating and recognizing success stories that may serve to help other public sector professionals to innovate and focus on reuse of open data as an engine for digital transformation and innovation.

Companies wishing to participate have until September 12 to present projects carried out in the last two years in which data reuse has contributed to the generation of social value, new businesses and/or improvements to society.

Applications, which will refer to initiatives that have made use of open public data generated by the Public Administration or data provided by private entities, must be submitted using the form available in the electronic head office of Red.es.

Projects will be evaluated during the month of September by representatives of the Aporta Initiative. The originality, usefulness and impact of the initiative will be taken into account in terms of the beneficiaries thereof.

The best two initiatives will receive recognition in the Aporta Conference to be held in late October 2017.

We hope that our dissemination and recognition of success stories in the reuse of public data will help many other professionals in the private sector to innovate and commit to the use of data generated by Public Administrations as a source of competitive advantage.

All information in datos.gob.es and Competition Rules of the 2017 Aporta Awards.

The first phase of the Aporta Challenge 2017: The value of data for the Administration has come to an end. The competition "How to reuse open data to improve efficiency in public administration", promoted by the State Secretariat for the Information Society and Digital Agenda, the Public Body Red.es and the General Secretariat for Digital Administration, received a total of 45 ideas from working groups in the academic and business sectors as well as individuals. Ten of these have been selected and move on to the second stage. The jury, which evaluated the ideas presented taking into account their relevance, quality and usefulness, stressed the high quality of all the proposals received.

The ten proposals selected as finalists in this first phase are the following:

• QME -Aporta: NL guidance in datos.gob.es consultations
  Search engine based on natural language guidance that seeks to facilitate the discovery of the data provided by the public administrations and reuse thereof between them.
• Licitalio: Your tool for comparison of public contracts
  A web tool which, using datamining and clustering techniques, aims to improve access to public sector contracts in order to facilitate selection or and reuse of the best bids according to the needs of the administration concerned.
• Informal analysis of licenses
  Mechanism to characterize licenses, using natural language processing techniques, aiming to detect swiftly what administration resources are duly licensed for reuse and which of them have conditions of use needing to be readjusted.
• Anfitrión (Host)
  Client server system intended to act as an interpreter for the transformation of sets of data in different formats to JSON, easily reusable by businesses and other administrations.
• Light
  Mobile application that, by introducing gamification mechanisms, proposes to encourage people to contribute together with the administrations to enable a more sustainable environment, by rewarding habits and actions such as using the public transport service.
• PLAN Platform
  Project aimed at publication of announcements prior to the launch of national tenders to which all economic agents could subscribe, encouraging competition and transparency.
• Analysis of content for public communication
  Initiative to streamline the response of administrations to the general public by means of analysis of the channels of communication citizens-city council, and identification or the interest prior to the request for information.
• Open News
  System designed to recommend open public datasets related to content generated by digital means, in order to encourage active citizen participation and transparency in public administrations.
• Funding Analytics For Innovation Projects
  Proposed development of an analytical web tool based on open data R&D+i projects aimed at analyzing and visualizing subsidies granted and detecting trends in research that help public administrations to evaluate and create new business lines for companies.
• My turn
  Mobile application that, while showing the number of people waiting their turn at the offices associated with a service offered by the administration, would analyze and manage waiting times for the public and therefore improve the administration’s efficiency.

Now the second phase of the Aporta Challenge is beginning, in which those responsible for the winning ideas have a period of two and half months to develop their prototypes, which they will present to the jurors next October 23.

Prizes of 3,000, 2,000 and 1,000 euros will be presented to the top three prototypes, which will be announced during the Aporta 2017 Meeting on 24 October.

We encourage the open data community to attend this meeting (attendance free) which this year reaches its seventh edition.

The first phase of the Aporta Challenge 2019 has come to an end. The deadline to present ideas to improve the efficiency of the agri-food, forestry and rural sectors ended on May 23. Now they will be evaluated by a jury of experts in the field.

42 original ideas seek the final

For 6 weeks - from April 9 to May 23 - the participants have been presenting their proposals for the first phase of the Challenge. In this first phase participant only needed to provide a detailed description of an original idea, using at least one data set generated by national or international Public Administrations and published under open license.

The result has been 42 proposals of high quality, the result of the work of private citizens (45% of the proposals) and multidisciplinary teams (55% of the proposals) that have launched their creativity to seek innovative solutions to the proposed challenge. Although the majority of proposals come from Spain, teams from Austria or the United Kingdom have also participated.

The presented solutions show a great thematic variety. There are many ways to boost efficiency in the agri-food, forestry and rural sectors, from improving the management of crops, to fostering the active rural settlement. This is well known to the participants in the Challenge, who have proposed solutions to optimize irrigation, reduce energy expenditure, prevent floods, boost rural tourism or promote entrepreneurship in rural areas, especially in areas that face a major demographic challenge. In addition, many of the solutions combine open data with new technologies such as artificial intelligence, laser scanners (LIDAR), the use of drones or blockchain.

It should be noted that 38% of the proposals are presented by women or teams that have a woman among its members. Although an increasing number of women are involved in the data world, these data show that there is still work to be done to achieve real equality.

A first level jury to choose the finalists

All the proposals received will be evaluated by an expert jury, made up of representatives of various associations and organizations:

• Aleida Alcaide, Ministry of Finance and Public Function.

• Salvador Luis Soriano, Ministry of Energy, Tourism and Digital Agenda.

• Maite Ambrós, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

• José Ignacio Sánchez, Red.es.

• Rosa Gallardo, University of Córdoba.

• Antonio Ibáñez, Junta of Castilla y León.

• José Nuño, Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces.

• José Luis Miguel de Diego, Farmer and Agriculture Organisation Coordinator.

• Martín Álvarez, World Wide Web Consortium.

• Paula Sánchez, Association of Electronics, Information Technology, Telecommunications and Digital Content Companies.

• Olga Quirós, Multisector Information Association.

Each member of the jury will assign a value of 0 to 10 points to each proposals. The aspects to be assessed will be the relevance or originality of the idea, its quality and clarity, its viability, its economical and social impact, and their potential to improve life quality of women and / or young people in the rural environment.

10 finalists will fight for the € 4,000 prize

After the evaluation, 10 proposals will go to the second phase, which will begin during the month of July.

In this second phase the finalist teams will have to develop a prototype, which could be a simulation, visualization, video or multimedia solution. The period to present the prototype will be 4 months. The Aporta Challenge will culminate in the Encuentro Aporta.

All finalists will have to defend their proposal again in front of the jury, which will designate the three winners. The winner will receive € 4,000, while the second and third finalists will receive € 3,000 and € 2,000 respectively.

The challenge

Aporta Challenge 2019 is an initiative promoted by datos.gob.es with the aim of identifying new ideas and prototypes based on open data, in order to help improve efficiency in strategic sectors for the Spanish economy, in this case, agri-food, forestry and rural sector. The Aporta Challenge drives the use and direct reuse of information generated by the public sector, encouraging participants’ talent, technical capacity and creativity. All the information about  Aporta Challenge 2019 can be found at https://datos.gob.es/es/desafios-aporta.

Agri-food, forestry and rural sector data

When we look for that much-desired inspiration to find innovative and brilliant solutions for a certain sector, we immediately think of data. Having a wealth of data to represent the key processes of a sector is synonymous with success in the creation of disruptive and valuable solutions.

In particular, the agri-food, forestry and rural sectors cannot be characterized correctly without adequate data. It is not possible to think of innovative solutions for these sectors without maps, territory distribution by uses, aerial images (with drones or airplanes), satellite images, data from terrestrial sensors, weather forecasts, etc.

To participate in the Aporta Challenge, it is necessary to use at least one source of open data generated by Public Administrations, whether national or international, and published under an open license. It can be any type of data: INE statistics, meteorological data published by AEMET... but, if something characterizes many digital solutions for these sectors, it is the (almost) indivisible association between data and maps. Therefore, this time we are going to focus on this type of data -although others could be used- and the rest of the ingredients needed to obtain the perfect recipe for Aporta Challenge 2019:

1. The use of Geographic Information System (GIS).
2. Analytical tools such as programming languages and data science environments, APIs and connectors for data sources access.
3. Visual data presentation and an adequate storytelling.

Geographic Information System (GIS)

The National Geographical Institute (IGN) is probably the best source of open geographic data in our country. In the IGN portal we can find validated and quality information in terms of geographic maps, PNOA (National Plan of Aerial Orthophotography) orthophotos and positioning services.

Intimately related to the IGN, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food offers the Agrarian Geographic Information System (SIGA) that shows cartographic and alphanumeric information, such as general cartography, thematic maps on agroclimatic variables or reports on municipalities and meteorological stations.

In addition, the website of the Ministry for Ecological Transition offers interesting data on maps. For example, the Ministry offers a service called Acuivisor to interactively explore the areas of mollusk production and aquaculture in Spain. In the same way, the Ministry offers citizens a Nature Data Bank where databases and thematic cartography can be found. Among many other open data, we can access to the Spanish forest map, which includes the distribution of Spanish forest stands since they began their first work a little over a hundred years ago.

For its part, the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET) makes available to citizens, through its open data portal, all data related to weather forecast and climate data so that it is accessible and reusable by both people and applications in order to develop innovative solutions.

But not only geographical data feed solutions aimed at improving the efficiency of the agri-food, forestry and rural sector. In this report, recently published by datos.gob.es, you can find other repositories and resources that can help you to design your solution.

Data environments and programming languages

Once data sources have been selected, we must think about sources access, to extract the data of interest, and then carry out the corresponding analyses, something that will take place during Phase 2 of the Challenge.

In data science, there is an iterative process that consists of extracting, manipulating and transforming interesting data, and then modeling and communicating the result appropriately in the form of conclusions and valuable information. If we want to implement this process to create our prototype for Aporta Challenge 2019, here are some tips:

1. Prototyping consists of failing fast and cheaply. Even if your team has the necessary programming skills, do not try to implement a complete (and therefore complex) solution based on data.
2. If you are building a prototype, use prototyping tools. The first prototyping tool is to access and explore manually the potentially interesting data for our solution, either using our own tools (spreadsheets, map viewers, etc.) or the integrated utilities offered by data repositories.
3. APIs and access to data repositories. We know that we can access to data offered in open and reusable standards in very different ways. We can use programs (access programmatically) and we can use tools such as Postman. Postman is a free product that has become a standard for accessing and testing APIs of all kinds. Postman allows you to extract data from any API easily and quickly. It is a great way to prototype.
4. Tell a good story. Before moving forward with your prototype in the following complexity phases, ask yourself if with the data you have (and its corresponding analysis) you are able to communicate a good story. Sometimes we can have some fantastic data and analysis but, nevertheless, we are not able to tell a good story.

Your DataStory

Finally, if you have good data, these are accessible and reusable, and you have verified that you have a good story, you just need to implement your solution in a solid way and assemble your story. If your team has programming skills, it is sure that you will use R or Python as the main languages ​​for data analysis. But do not stay there. Telling a good story goes far beyond programming and analysing data.

Telling a good story is about writing a good script (the storyline). Telling a good story is about falling in love and surprising the audience and, for that, you need good design and impressive images that reinforce the data message. If you are able to combine the presentation of your story with a functional application that shows the value of the data you use, you will have won. Telling your story through a web application such as Shiny will give you many points. If you prefer to emphasize the value of analyzing your data in a modern and current way, use notebooks like Jupyter and you will have assured success. If you need inspiration or go deeper into this concept of data-based stories (remember that maps play a special role in Aporta Challenge 2019) I recommend you visit the ESRI company's StoryMaps website and you can check the strength of a good story based on data and maps. In the post on Medium you will find a list of different types of tools to tell stories with data.

Example of StoryMap related to the theme of the Aporta Challenge 2019. https://storymaps.esri.com/stories/2019/anthropocene/3-forests/index.ht…;

Cheer up and go for Aporta Challenge 2019!

Content prepared by Alejandro Alija, expert in Digital Transformation and innovation.

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