premios Aporta

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linknovate, an innovative search engine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Linknovate, the winning company of the 1st edition of Aporta Awards, is a software provider that tracks all the scientific production published on the internet, ranking the contents according to its own algorithm. Its search engine optimizes the time spent searching for information, facilitating contact between the academic and the business world.

We interviewed Manuel Noya and José López Veiga, Linknovate's associates, to tell us about their experience and opinion about the reuse of public information in Spain.

Linknovate is one of the biggest database of science and technology, with more than 20 million references, what is the potential of the data that you make available to citizens and companies?

At Linknovate we do not focus so much on the amount of documents, although we have a very good coverage from 2010 to 2018, but on its quality and usefulness. It is about understanding perfectly what organizations are behind those documents, who are their authors, their keywords, etc. There are many scientific databases but none puts the focus on cleaning and providing insights on these data, and broadening the perspective to what matters to companies: applications, related products... It is important to know what the specific activity of a company is, because it can be a potential partner or competitor.

What public information sources do you use to enrich your database?

Let's say that they can be divided into academic and industrial sources. In the academic world, we have scientific publications and conference proceedings with a similar coverage to Elsevier's Scopus, one of the most complete (and expensive) academic databases. On the other hand, in the industrial world, we obtain information from US and European trademark and patent registrations, news, corporate websites, etc. We could include a third type of sources, the academic-industrial mix, where we could find scholarships and European (FP7, H2020) and American (NSF, SBIR / STTR, DOE) projects.

In your opinion, what are the main sectors of activity that take advantage of Linknovate's open data potential? Who reuses the data and what is their objective?

Professionals from strategy, technology and innovation sectors, with the goal of making data-based decisions (business intelligence), the development of new products and searching for improvements (in products and processes). We target both industry professionals and researchers from technology centres and institutes.

How could we promote open scientific data in Spain?

 Promoting and rewarding those who enable open data, and above all, ensuring that quality data is appropriate. For example, it is important to promote "machine-readable" data, that is, readable by a machine without investing resources in cleaning and structuring the information. Many innovation data in Spain, for example, those related to companies that receive public funding, are public (you can see the redundancy if you try to explain it), but a large majority are non-readable PDFs, which can be processed without human intervention.

If an organization is motivated to share its data, with quality, due to an incentives system, in the long term, that and other organizations from the sector would confirm the benefits, as happens with open access software, reaching levels difficult to achieve by their own, without a community. Without incentives, this barrier is difficult to overcome, although the trend is clearly positive: there are more and more success stories.

What measures do you consider necessary to encourage national private sector companies to open, reuse and create innovative services based on open data?

In certain "structural" sectors it should be mandatory for companies to share their data as part of the services they provide (for example, concessionaires or bid winners), especially in sectors such as health, energy, public financing, etc. Always taking care of user’s privacy, of course.

In other cases, increasing public subsidies and incentives (tax incentives, innovation bonds, etc.) can be the necessary boost for a company to test and test what they can do with its Open Data. Promoting startups and SMEs that create value from these data makes the ecosystem grow and be sustainable: a company has more and more "answers" to the challenges that hide their data.

What are the next steps that Linknovate will follow as regards open data?

Now we are focusing on a new functionality: the ability to "follow" a topic (thanks to our ability to follow companies and / or research groups, and find news, patents, publications and almost any document related to innovation). A second part of this "alert system" is the ability to make a brief summary and visualize "insights", such as which new companies have searched for the topic or what new applications are more popular, among others.

Do you think initiatives such as the 2017 Aporta Awards can help boost the reuse of open data? What other initiatives of this kind do you think should be put into practice?

Of course. Awards, such as Aporta, help to give visibility to small companies that make up this ecosystem.

We believe that facilitating private contest and competitions is the key (where both the data and the need / challenge to solve come from the private company / industry). The public sector can and should be the one who opens the way, but this is only sustainable when the industry is aligned. The public sector should give an example of how to easy share open data, with quality and traceability. The European Data Portal and CORDIS are examples to follow.

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

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

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