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The National Observatory of Telecommunications and the Information Society (ONTSI) publishes annually the report on  the infomediary sector characterization which analyzes in detail the activities and influence of industry in the national socioeconomic sphere.

The fourth edition of this report collects data from 535 infomediary companies during 2015, all of them specialized in the development of products and services based on the re-use of public and/or private information. The necessary data for the elaboration of this study was collected through surveys to the different companies of the sector.

In this edition, as a novelty compared to previous years, the characterization study is accompanied by a document which lists eleven successful cases of infomediary companies in Spain. Thanks to both studies, it is possible to have a detailed image of the Spanish infomediary sector which encompasses both the volume of business, the jobs generated at national level, the origin of the re-used information, as well as the barriers and opportunities detected by the companies interviewed.

Regularly, the Ministries of Energy, Tourism and Digital Agenda and Internal Revenue Service & Public Administrations, through the National Observatory of Telecommunications & the Information Society (ONTSI), publish a report on the characterization of the Spanish infomediary sector. A document that analyses in detail the activities and impact of an industry that, only in 2015, generated a turnover between 600 and 750 million euros.

The fourth edition of this report was recently published, which collects data from 652 infomediary companies in 2015. The report deals with companies specialized in the development of apps, products and added value services based on the re-use of public and private information, data which is obtained through the review of secondary sources, including public data providers and the Trade Registry.

This is a booming industry whose volume of activity has increased 46% and, moreover, according to the information contained in the report, has grown 10% in comparison with 2014.This figure reaches 63% if the tendency is analysed since the date when the report was published for the first time, in the year 2011.

Origin of the re-used information

82% of companies in the infomediary sector re-use public information, coming almost exclusively (96%) from national sources such as the National Statistics Institute, the Official State Bulletin, the National Geographic Institute, the Trade Registry and the State Meteorology Agency, among others. In the case of foreign information, the European Union is the main data provider (69%) along with other international organizations (63%), followed by administrations outside the EU (57%) and universities (23%).

It is important to highlight the role of open data within the sector, as the number of companies re-using information in open format has increased with respect to the previous study, reaching 69% of the total. Nevertheless, 68% of the sector still has to make specific requests because the information they require is not available.

Barriers and opportunities for re-use

The re-use of information, regardless of the source from which it comes, enables the creation of value added products and services, and is a great asset to boost the economy, employment and the progress of the knowledge society, especially in the area of Smart cities and social data. Nevertheless, the ONTSI study identifies as the main obstacle to infomediary activity the lack of homogeneity of information at regional and local level, this being an additional barrier to the following demands:

● Greater proactivity in the management of the information of the Public Administration information, promoting open data by default.

●  Development of ICT tools that facilitate the automation of the processes of access, refinement, treatment, enrichment and analysis of public data.

● Improved availability and quality of public data, promoting open reusable formats, interoperability and ensuring access to information.

● Promotion of public-private collaboration for the development of the infomediary market

As regards the future of the sector, companies refer to a wide range of possibilities linked to the development of products or services focussed on real-time decision-making, based on social network analysis, and data from Smart Cities, and  new tools that allow the automated data management and interpretation. In this sense, the advance in the big data movement and the tools for their exploitation and support will be key elements for the future development of the sector.

This report falls within the scope of actions aimed at encouraging the openness of public sector information and favouring its re-use, one of the most relevant lines of action in recent years of Red.es, implemented through the Aporta Initiative. Thus the 2016 edition of the Report on the Infomediary Sector Characterization provides greater knowledge about the activity of this industry, incorporating new aspects compared with previous documents by performing a systematic analysis of the sector, regardless of the origin of the re-used information, and including a set of good practices of infomediary companies from which recommendations can be made that help other projects in the sector.

ASEDIE (Multisectoral Information Association) has published its report in which components, market behavior and characteristics of infomediary sector in Spain are analysed. To carry out this study, the entity has identified and analyzed 602 infomediary companies (21 companies less than in the previous edition) -firms that re-use public/private sector information to develop products or services for the whole society- classified into nine segments: culture; directory services; economic and financial; publishing; market studies; geographic information; weather; tourism and others.

Located mostly in the Community of Madrid and Catalonia, 50% of the evaluated companies belong to the market research area, as previous years, followed by financial entities with a 14 per cent and cultural institutions with a 10 per cent. The less representative sector is the meteorological industry, which covers only 1% of the total.

Analyzing the origin of the type of information, 90% of the infomediary companies operate with private information (42% only "private" and 48% "public and private"), and 58% of them use public information (10% only "public" and 48% "public and private").

Total revenues associated with the infomediary companies in 2014 were close to 1,400 million euros compared to 1,000 million in 2013. This figure allows to assign average revenue of 2.27 million euros per company; concentrated in four groups: market research, economic and financial, geographic information and publishing. In addition, the number of employees in this sector during that year exceeded 15,000 workers, decreasing 3.2% from the previous report.

Nevertheless, a sign of the remarkable evolution of national infomediary sector is the 6.6% growth in sales in comparison to the previous year, a positive evolution if we take into account that the turnover for 2013 had dropped 2% in sales.

Moreover, the assessment methodology of this last reports has been slightly modified, adding three new types of analysis: two of them based on the evolution of the companies included in previous reports and the third divides the companies into five sections according to their commercial risk exposure and their probability of default. In this regard, 77% of the infomediary companies are included in the group of low-moderate risk, 19.6% of them are included in the high-maximum level and, finally, 3.5% of the companies are defaulting.

Thanks to the study and its evolutionary analysis of the last four years, ASEDIE report shows us that information is an important and essential resource for socio-economic growth in Spain; allowing the assessment of impact, relevance, qualities and influence of the sector at national level and the comparison  with other geographical areas.