Madrid

This is a Telegram bot that provides information about the nearest water source to the user's location. This application generated from the reuse of information from the catalog of the open data portal of the Madrid City Council shares the address of the nearest source. If the user prefers, he/she can also provide a map of the location where the fountain is located or even search for the next closest one.  

In this video you can see the practical application of the bot 

Sign up for SEMIC 2023 and discover the interoperable Europe in the era of artificial intelligence. According to the forecasts of the European Commission, by 2025, the global volume of data will have increased by 530%, and in this context, it is crucial to ensure data interoperability and reuse. Thus, the European Union is working on creating a digital model that promotes data sharing while ensuring people's privacy and data interoperability.

The European Data Strategy includes the launch of common and interoperable data spaces in strategic sectors. In this context, various initiatives have emerged to discuss the processes, standards, and tools suitable for data management and exchange, which also serve to promote a culture of information and reuse. One of these initiatives is SEMIC, the most important interoperability conference in Europe, whose 2023 edition will take place on October 18th in Madrid, organized by the European Commission in collaboration with the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

SEMIC 2023, which can also be attended virtually, focuses on 'Interoperable Europe in the AI era.' The sessions will address data spaces, digital governance, data quality assurance, generative artificial intelligence, and code as law, among other aspects. Information about the proposal for an Interoperable Europe Law will also be presented.

Pre-Workshops

Attendees will have the opportunity to learn about specific use cases where public sector interoperability and artificial intelligence have mutually benefited. Although SEMIC 2023 will take place on October 18th, the day before, three interesting workshops will also be held, which can be attended both in-person and virtually:

• Artificial Intelligence in Policy Design for the Digital Age and in Legal Text Writing: This workshop will explore how AI-driven tools can assist policymakers in public policy formulation. Different tools, such as the Policy Analysis Prototype (SeTA) or intelligent functionalities for legal drafting (LEOS), will be discussed.
• Large Language Models in Support of Interoperability: This session will explore the methods and approaches proposed for using large language models and AI technology in the context of semantic interoperability. It will focus on the state of LLM and its application to semantic clustering, data discovery, and terminology expansion, among other applications supporting semantic interoperability.
• European Register of Public Sector Semantic Models: This workshop will define actions to create an entry point for connecting national collections of semantic assets.

Interactions Between Artificial Intelligence, Interoperability, and Semantics

The main SEMIC 2023 conference program includes roundtable discussions and various working sessions that will run in parallel. The first session will address Estonia's experience as one of the first European countries to implement AI in the public sector and its pioneering role in interoperability.

In the morning, an interesting roundtable will be held on the potential of artificial intelligence to support interoperability. Speakers from different EU Member States will present success stories and challenges related to deploying AI in the public sector.

In the second half of the morning, three parallel sessions will take place:

• Crafting Policies for the Digital Age and Code as Law: This session will identify the main challenges and opportunities in the field of AI and interoperability, focusing on 'code as law' as a paradigm. Special attention will be given to semantic annotation in legislation.
• Interconnecting Data Spaces: This session will address the main challenges and opportunities in the development of data spaces, with a special focus on interoperability solutions. It will also discuss synergies between the Data Spaces Support Center (DSSC) and the European Commission's DIGIT specifications and tools.
• Automated Public Services: This session will provide an approach to automating access to public services with the help of AI and chatbots.

In the afternoon, three more parallel sessions will be held:

• Knowledge Graphs, Semantics, and AI: This session will demonstrate how traditional semantics benefit from AI.
• Data Quality in Generative and General-Purpose AI: This session will review the main data quality issues in the EU and discuss strategies to overcome them.
• Trustworthy AI for Public Sector Interoperability: This session will discuss the opportunities for using AI for interoperability in the public sector and the transparency and reliability challenges of AI systems.

In the afternoon, there will also be a roundtable discussion on the upcoming challenges, addressing the technological, social, and political implications of advances in AI and interoperability from the perspective of policy actions. Following this panel, the closing sessions will take place.

The previous edition, held in Brussels, brought together over 1,000 professionals from 60 countries, both in-person and virtually. Therefore, SEMIC 2023 presents an excellent opportunity to learn about the latest trends in interoperability in the era of artificial intelligence.

You can register here: https://semic2023.eu/registration/

From September 25^th to 27^th , Madrid will be hosting the fourth edition of the Open Science Fair, an international event on open science that will bring together experts from all over the world with the aim of identifying common practices, bringing positions closer together and, in short, improving synergies between the different communities and services working in this field. 

This event is an initiative of OpenAIRE, an organisation that aims to create more open and transparent academic communication. This edition of the Open Science Fair is co-organised by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT), which depends on the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and is one of the events sponsored by the Spanish Presidency of the spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union. 

The current state of open science

Science is no longer the preserve of scientists. Researchers, institutions, funding agencies and scientific publishers are part of an ecosystem that carries out work with a growing resonance with the public and a greater impact on society. In addition, it is becoming increasingly common for research groups to open up to collaborations with institutions around the world. Key to making this collaboration possible is the availability of data that is open and available for reuse in research.

However, to enable international and interdisciplinary research to move forward, it is necessary to ensure interoperability between communities and services, while maintaining the capacity to support different workflows and knowledge systems. 

The objectives and programme of the Open Science Fair

In this context, the Open Science Fair 2023 is being held, with the aim of bringing together and empowering open science communities and services, identifying common practices related to open science to analyse the most suitable synergies and, ultimately sharing experiences that are developed in different parts of the world. 

The event has an interesting programme that includes keynote speeches from relevant speakers, round tables, workshops, and training sessions, as well as a demonstration session. Attendees will be able to share experiences and exchange views, which will help define the most efficient ways for communities to work together and draw up tailor-made roadmaps for the implementation of open science. 

This third edition of Open Science will focus on 'Open Science for Future Generations' and the main themes it will address, as highlighted on the the event's website, are:

• Progress and reform of research evaluation and open science. Connections, barriers and the way forward.
• Impact of artificial intelligence on open science and impact of open science on artificial intelligence.
• Innovation and disruption in academic publishing.
• Fair data, software and hardware.
• Openness in research and education.
• Public engagement and citizen science.

Open science and artificial intelligence 

The artificial intelligence is gaining momentum in academia through data analysis. By analysing large amounts of data, researchers can identify patterns and correlations that would be difficult to reach through other methods. The use of open data in open science opens up an exciting and promising future, but it is important to ensure that the benefits of artificial intelligence are available to all in a fair and equitable way. 

Given its high relevance, the Open Science Fair will host two keynote lectures and a panel discussion on 'AI with and for open science'. The combination of the benefits of open data and artificial intelligence is one of the areas with the greatest potential for significant scientific breakthroughs and, as such, will have its place at the event is one of the areas with the greatest potential for significant scientific breakthroughs and, as such, will have its place at the event. It will look from three perspectives (ethics, infrastructure and algorithms) at how artificial intelligence supports researchers and what the key ingredients are for open infrastructures to make this happen. 

The programme of the Open Science Fair 2023 also includes the presentation of a demo of a tool for mapping the research activities of the European University of Technology EUt+ by leveraging open data and natural language processing. This project includes the development of a set of data-driven tools. Demo attendees will be able to see the developed platform that integrates data from public repositories, such as European research and innovation projects from CORDIS, patents from the European Patent Office database and scientific publications from OpenAIRE. National and regional project data have also been collected from different repositories, processed and made publicly available. 

These are just some of the events that will take place within the Open Science Fair, but the full programme includes a wide range of events to explore multidisciplinary knowledge and research evaluation. 

Although registration for the event is now closed, you can keep up to date with all the latest news through the hashtag #OSFAIR2023 on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as on the event's website website. 

In addition, on the website of datos.gob.es and on our social networks you can keep up to date on the most important events in the field of open data, such as those that will take place during this autumn.

The visual representation of data helps our brain to digest large amounts of information quickly and easily. Interactive visualizations make it easier for non-experts to analyze complex situations represented as data.

As we introduced in our last post on this topic, graphical data visualization is a whole discipline  within the universe of data science. In this new post we want to put the focus on interactive data visualizations. Dynamic visualizations allow the user to interact with data and transform it into graphs, tables and indicators that have the ability to display different information according to the filters set by the user. To a certain extent, interactive visualizations are an evolution of classic visualizations, allowing us to condense much more information in a space similar to the usual reports and presentations. 

The evolution of digital technologies has shifted the focus of visual data analytics to the web and mobile environments. The tools and libraries that allow the generation and conversion of classic or static visualizations into dynamic or interactive ones are countless. However, despite the new formats of representation and generation of visualizations, sometimes there is a risk of forgetting the good practices of design and composition, which must always be present. The ease to condense large amounts of information into interactive visualisations can means that, on many occasions, users try to include a lot of information in a single graph and make even the simplest of reports unreadable. But, let's go back to the positive side of interactive visualizations and analyse some of their most significant advantages.

Benefits of interactive displays

The benefits of interactive data displays are several:

• Web and mobile technologies mainly. Interactive visualizations are designed to be consumed from modern software applications, many of them 100% web and mobile oriented. This makes them easy to read from any device.
• More information in the same space. The interactive displays show different information depending on the filters applied by the user. Thus, if we want to show the monthly evolution of the sales of a company according to the geography, in a classic visualization, we would use a bar chart (months in the horizontal axis and sales in the vertical axis) for each geography. On the contrary, in an interactive visualization, we use a single bar chart with a filter next to it, where we select the geography we want to visualize at each moment.
• Customizations. With interactive visualizations, the same report or dashboard can be customized for each user or groups of users. In this way, using filters as a menu, we can select some data or others, depending on the type and level of the user-consumer.
• Self-service. There are very simple interactive visualization technologies, which allow users to configure their own graphics and panels on demand by simply having the source data accessible. In this way, a non-expert user in visualization, can configure his own report with only dragging and dropping the fields he wants to represent.

Practical example

To illustrate with a practical example the above reasoning we will select a data se available in  datos.gob.es data catalogue. In particular, we have chosen the air quality data of the Madrid City Council for the year 2020. This dataset contains the measurements (hourly granularity) of pollutants collected by the air quality network of the City of Madrid. In this dataset, we have the hourly time series for each pollutant in each measurement station of the Madrid City Council, from January to May 2020. For the interpretation of the dataset, it is also necessary to obtain the interpretation file in pdf format. Both files can be downloaded from the following website (It is also available through datos.gob.es).

Interactive data visualization tools

Thanks to the use of modern data visualization tools (in this case Microsoft Power BI, a free and easily accessible tool) we have been able to download the air quality data for 2020 (approximately half a million records) in just 30 minutes and create an interactive report. In this report, the end user can choose the measuring station, either by using the filter on the left or by selecting the station on the map below. In addition, the user can choose the pollutant he/she is interested in and a range of dates. In this static capture of the report, we have represented all the stations and all the pollutants. The objective is to see the significant reduction of pollution in all pollutants (except ozone due to the suppression of nitrogen oxides) due to the situation of sudden confinement caused by the Covid-19 pandemic since mid-March. To carry out this exercise we could have used other tools such as MS Excel, Qlik, Tableau or interactive visualization packages on programming environments such as R or Python. These tools are perfect for communicating data without the need for programming or coding skills.

In conclusion, the discipline of data visualization (Visual Analytics) is a huge field that is becoming very relevant today thanks to the proliferation of web and mobile interfaces wherever we look. Interactive visualizations empower the end user and democratize access to data analysis with codeless tools, improving transparency and rigor in communication in any aspect of life and society, such as science, politics and education.

Content elaborated 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.

Those interested can suggest scenarios, projects or ideas for the organization of the event, or participate in the promotion and dissemination of the meeting, which will take place worldwide on March 7.

Madrid, November 28, 2019. On March 7, the Open Data Day 2020 (# DD2020) will be held worldwide, giving a new opportunity to development and progress through the management of open data. In this new edition, in which the tenth anniversary of this international meeting is celebrated, we suggest to the participants to coordinate to reach a higher number of people - professionals, citizens interested in the use of open data, researchers, journalists, political decision makers ... - to build new solutions to the problems of each community using data.

Organized in Madrid by the Ontological Engineering Group (OEG) since its inception, and in collaboration with the node of the Open Data Institute in the Community of Madrid (ODI Madrid) since 2016, the International Open Data Day has been a good opportunity to collaborate in the management, organization, visualization and communication of projects through the use of open data that municipalities and public institutions make available to the citizen.

On this occasion, and after several years celebrating the meeting in the centre of Madrid, the organization has opened the door to organize the Open Data Day in a new scenario of the Community of Madrid, to make participation more open and closer.

Those who want to collaborate with ODI Madrid and the OEG in the organization of #ODD2020 can complete the form created for this purpose, or send an e-mail to mailto:odi_madrid@delicias.dia.fi.upm.es expressing the intention to participate in the organization of the open data day 2020.

Among the proposals that are already available for Open Data Day 2020 we can find TheyBuyForYou and ACTION, two H2020 projects that will participate with mentoring and teams organization on issues related to the control and management of expenditure and public procurement, and with a design of specific programs of Citizen Science and Open Science through open data.

 More about OpenDataDay:

http://madrid.theodi.org/2019/11/26/organiza-con-nosotros-el-dia-de-los…

https://blog.okfn.org/2019/11/08/getting-ready-for-open-data-day-2020-o…

https://www.europeandataportal.eu/es/news/save-date-open-data-day-2020

Content prepared based on the information received from ODI Madrid.

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

The new school year has already begun. While students are gradually returning to schools, companies and organizations are also recovering their activity. The last quarter of the year is chosen by a large number of organizations to launch events that help us to better understand the universe of open data, bringing us success stories and giving us the opportunity to discuss the future challenges.

In datos.gob.es we have compiled some of these events:

• On September 14, the Tech.Party 2019 is held at the Nave de Madrid. This event brings together more than 30 technological communities with the objective of “sharing knowledge and stimulating critical thinking”. Conferences and workshops will address issues such as blockchain technology, data analysis, artificial intelligence, hacktivism or technological recycling.

• Ten days later, on September 24, the #GIGAPP2019 Workshop: Civic applications and open data to supervise the power will be organized by Medialab Prado. This event will introduce recent Ibero-American experiences related to data opening for public accountability. Attendees will have the opportunity to share and discuss impressions with the creators of these tools.

• Meanwhile, the IV International Congress of Transparency will take place in Malaga from September 30 to October 2. The event will be structured in plenary sessions and seminars. Each seminar will act as a working group where different subjects will be discussed, including active advertising, open data and citizen participation.

• Cáceres will host, from October 23 to 25, the X Iberian Conference on Spatial Data Infrastructures (JIIDE 2019). Under the slogan "Local IDEs, bringing digital information to citizens", technical sessions, workshops and round tables will be held to share and publicize the Inspire Directive and the various activities carried out by local IDEs. Open data and e-administration will also be discussed.

• The Barcelona City Council has launched a new edition of the Barcelona Dades Obertes Challenge, a contest aimed at promoting knowledge and the use of open data in the educational centres of Barcelona. In addition, a new edition of the World Data Viz Challenge Barcelona_Kobe is also expected for the coming months.

• Two of the big conferences that every year close the autumn events season will also take place in the Catalan capital. We are talking about the IoT Solution world Congress and the Smart City Expo 2019. The first one will take place in October 29-31 and it will address blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, e-health and other issues where open data can have a great role. For its part, the Smart City Expo 2019 will be held from November 19 to 21. It will be a mandatory meeting for those interested in cities based on data, 5G and the future of connectivity.

All these events highlight the interest in data and open data in the business and social ecosystem. An interest that continues to grow year by year, with new editions of events already held and the incorporation of new appointments to the agenda, so that all those interested in the subject can continue learning.

Every item of data counts. And even more so where well-identified and structured data is concerned. A single gap such as gender in datasets can mean a great deal. The Data Journalism Conferences, which have been held in MediaLab Prado thanks to Data Lab, this year reached their 5th edition with the slogan "every item of data counts". From May 3 - 6, journalists and others interested in communication, journalism and data attended the various workshops, talks and round tables.

How to request data from the administration? How to find data on the website of the National Institute of Statistics? What options does the New York Times API offer? What about the National Statistics Institute? Can one automate statistical queries? What possibilities for analyzing tweets does the open tool TCAT have? Why do they call it visualization when they mean map? What can be done and how with Bootstrap? These were some of the topics and sessions of the 2017 Fifth Data Journalism Conference: data visualization, cartography, new editing and analysis tools, and coding.

The first session was conducted by Esperanza Zambrano, deputy director for claims of the Council of Transparency and Good Governance, who explained the procedure for the public in general and journalists in particular to carry out requests for data management. She detailed some of the most common problems: the data does not exist at the time of making the request, the request is denied for commercial interests or data protection, etc. "The Transparency Law provides the legal framework for citizens to request data, and when it comes to making a request for information it is important to be clear about exactly what we want and which administration possesses it, even though the Council portal itself processes requests for data and redirects them". In Spain, requests for information require identification - electronic or paper - but not motivation. Information is public.

The use of APIs was addressed in two practical workshops: the use of the  NYT API  with the R programming language and how to access the API of the National Statistics Institute (INE) website. Inés Huertas, of Datatons and Data Science Madrid, and Leticia Martín-Fuertes, of R-Ladies, demonstrated this programming language that allows data scientists to manage large volumes of statistical data, is open source and offers a variety of libraries and graphic display capability. Laura Guerrero, INE, stressed: "We are giving visibility to the API and the interesting thing is that the user can automate statistical queries". Data series, data tables or metadata.

"Capturing Twitter data is a challenge". Alberto Abellán and Saya Saulière showed the open source TCAT  tool focused on social analysis and research. An open tool that allows two things: on the one hand capture of tweets and on the other hand twitter analysis data: "let the data do the talking."

Open data and services in the world of cartography. The new data policy of the National Centre for Geographic Information - CNIG - was presented as part of this conference by Antonio F. Rodríguez, who detailed data and open services in cartography (municipalities, population bodies, maps, roads, etc.) and how bureaucratic and technical barriers to data availability and use have been eliminated. Recently, we gave an account on our open data portal of CNIG's latest developments regarding  open data.

Installation and editing tools utilities  such as Bootstrap, useful tools for working with data, such as the Cygwin console or the Emacs editor, or Screple, a data visualization tool, also had their space and time in this conference, which also offered the round table: "New forms of visualization and electoral analysis", with the participation of Juan Enrique Cotillas, Deputy Director of Infographics and Graphic Design for RTVE, and Kiko Llaneras, El País. The digital and paper integration of Diari Ara was another of the presentations, in which the person responsible, Auri García, reminded the audience that stories involving narrative are more valued and read than pure data.

The 2017 5th Data Journalism Conference was inaugurated on May 3 - World Press Freedom Day - and also coincided with the second session of the production workshop of data journalism that is taking place over three alternate weekends in April, May and June.

On the occasion of the International Open Data Conference  and included on the agenda of events before IODC 2016, the Open Cities Summit will take place on 5th October at Media-Lab Prado in Madrid.

This meeting will bring together international open data practitioners in order to show how open data is being used around the world to improve the lives of citizens at the city level, facilitate knowledge exchange around open cities, and ideate solutions to overcome identified challenges in creating open cities as regards four areas: management of an open data policy, urban planning, environment and competitiveness.

The Open Cities Summit is aimed at civil servants, journalists, civil society organizations, researchers and any citizen who believes in the potential of open data to improve the environments in which they live. Thus, the event will consist of workshops, lectures and round tables, which will be structured in three parts. Firstly, the experts will share policies of their open data cities and show how their open data policies are helping improve the lives of citizens. Secondly, participants will be working in groups to ideate solutions to overcome the four different challenges mentioned above and finally, there will be open space to discuss the challenges and opportunities of creating an open city.

The organizing committee has opened a Call for Actions for open data practitioners who can submit initiatives in the field, especially those that offer an answer to the problems of urban development, environment, competitiveness and management of open data policies. The aim is capture a representative sample of best practices and to enrich the debate on the potential of open data for subnational governments. The deadline for the proposals is  15th August.

“Crowd-sourcing questions that if answered could radically increase our understanding of open data”

On October 5th, international researchers will gather at the second Open Data Research Symposium (ODRS); a pre-event to the International Open Data Conference to be held in Madrid. As in the previous edition, ODRS 16 will offer attendees the opportunity to reflect critically on the results of their investigations while cohesion is sought within the research community about the potential impacts of open data.

Though the ODRS call for proposals ended last May, the deadline has been extended to all members of the open data movement to help shape the program of the event, focusing on the most relevant aspects in the field. To do this, the organization has created a specific section on the Symposium website where users can submit questions for researchers to resolve their doubts about open data. Moreover, it is also possible to send the questions via Twitter using the hashtag #ODSR16. The deadline is July 1st.

Thanks to user’s questions, it will be possible to identify the topics of interest to the international open data community, draft the ODRS program to ensure sessions are tailored to the needs of the participants, build a collaborative agenda and report efforts and collaborations that take place during the meeting.

More information about the pre-events to the annual open data meeting? Stay tuned to the website of the International Open Data Conference. See you in Madrid!

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