Sector público

Although local governments are the closest actors to citizens, they often face limitations in terms of resources and capacities to implement open data effectively. The diputations, as intermediate institutions between central government and municipalities, play a key role in coordinating, supporting and facilitating open data at the local level.

In this article, we will explore the work of the Diputaciones in this area, showing some examples.

Why is it important for local authorities to commit to open data?

Local open data is of great importance to citizens because of its high granularity. These data provide information on specific settings, which gives a detailed picture of the situation of citizens in that area and shows disparities between municipalities.

This offers multiple advantages. On the one hand, public administrationscan develop better policies and manage resources more efficiently. On the other hand, businesses, researchers and entrepreneurshave the opportunity to develop new, more customised solutions based on the needs of each location. It also improves transparency and accountability, fostering trust in local institutions, and facilitates citizen participationby giving residents access to key data about their municipalities, which can contribute to more active and informed decision-making.

Challenges for local authorities in opening up their data

Despite the advantages, local authorities face a number of challenges in trying to make their data available to citizens, many of which are related to resource constraints and technical capacity:

• Lack of technical and human resources: Many municipalities, especially small and medium-sized ones, do not have the trained staff and resources to manage and publish open data. Lack of IT and data management expertise can hinder the implementation of open data initiatives.
• Inadequate infrastructure: Open data requires adequate technological infrastructure, such as platforms and storage systems to host data in an accessible and secure way.
• Awareness and resistance to change: In some municipalities, both policy makers and public employees may not fully understand the benefits of open data, leading to resistance to change.
• Data quality and standardisation issues: Municipal data are often scattered across different systems and formats, which can make standardisation and validation difficult. Ensuring that data is correct, up to date and in reusable formats is a major technical challenge.
• Cost of implementing, maintaining and updating data: Opening up data involves not only having the right infrastructure and staff, but also investing in platforms, software and other tools needed to make the information accessible to the public, which can be a barrier for municipalities with tight budgets. Moreover, once data is available to the public, it is necessary to keep it up to date and ensure that it remains relevant, which is a constant effort.

How can county councils help local authorities to overcome these challenges?

The Diputaciones are supra-municipal entities whose functions include legal, economic and technical assistance and cooperation to the municipalities in their province, especially those of smaller size or fewer resources. Among other things, they offer support in technological and managerial matters, for example in administrative tasks, the provision of public services or economic development.

In the context of open data, local councils can act as "facilitators" of open data at local level, through different actions:

1. Technical advice and training

The Diputaciones offer training to municipalities so that municipal employees can learn how to manage and open data. This is something that the Diputación de Salamanca, for example, has done with this course, whose objectives included raising participants' awareness of the importance of open data as a means to enhance citizen participation, helping them to understand technical issues in order to boost the degree of openness of institutions.

The Diputación de Castellón, for its part, provides support to small municipalities in opening their data, offering support materials related to open data. Another example is the Provincial Council of Albacete, which provides technical assistance, monitoring and support to its 87 municipalities through the Provincial Sustainability Observatory of Albacete (OPSA), an entity in collaboration with the University of Castilla-La Mancha. To this end, it offers sustainability reports (with 25 indicators), monitors its localization plans and emission studies, offers training and guides related to the sustainability of its municipalities related to open data, etc. 

2. Technological infrastructure

Some councils provide digital platforms and tools for municipalities to upload and share data in a simple way. This includes hosting open data portals or analysis and visualisation tools.

This is the case of the Diputación de Bizkaia, whose scope affects the foral public sector (Foral Entities) and the Local Entities of Bizkaia. Through the BiscayTIK foundation, municipalities can join the Open Data Bizkaia portal so that their data can appear on this portal. In addition, a customised view is generated that can be embedded in the municipality's own website, in case they want to have their own open data portal.

Another example is the Diputación de Córdoba. Its provincial strategy consists of unifying efforts and making a common platform for all municipalities, through automated processes of extraction and processing of structured information for publication, without the need for manual dedication on the part of staff. Through the Enlaza project, the platform receives and monitors information obtained both from citizens and from the sensors and systems of the multiple municipal services, and then carries out a cross analysis of the data. With this service, all the town councils in the province of Cordoba can have a homogeneous catalogue of open data with automated loading, which in turn is federated with datos.gob.es, saving this procedure for smaller administrations.

The Diputación de Albacete, for its part, has a platform with an open data exhibition of the panel of local indicators of the province (48 sub-indicators with a historical series of +15 years). The standardization of open data facilitates municipal and provincial analysis, allowing the comparison of municipalities with graphical and georeferenced output. Includes download space with user registration.

Thanks to these actions double efforts and duplication of uploading of information on various platforms are avoided. In addition, the standardisation of open data facilitates regional analysis and comparison between municipalities, generating new opportunities for innovation and improvement in the quality of life of citizens.

3. Grants or funding

Sometimes, the local councils allocate financial resources so that small municipalities can implement open data projects. An example of this is the Diputación de Valencia, whose functions include fostering and developing the right of access to information, as well as promoting the re-use of public data. To this end, in 2024, it launched a series of aids.

In this line the Diputación de Albacete has an annual aid or call for municipalities to implement their Agendas 2030 or projects related to sustainability and included in their plans. For example, in February 2025 the call was published with a budget of € 325,000.

4. Awareness-raising and reuse promotion actions

Another area where county councils can help is the promotion of favourable frameworks for data re-use. The Diputación de Castellón, for example, maintains a close relationship with civil society organisations and universities to meet their data demands. With the collaboration of the Diputación de Barcelona and the Government of Aragón, organised in 2024 the III National Open Data Meeting, where the importance of open data as a resource for understanding and achieving interesting and sustainable tourism was disseminated.

For its part, the Diputación de Bizkaia is launching competitions such as the Open Data & Artificial Intelligence Challenge, aimed at identifying initiatives that combine the reuse of data available on the Open Data Bizkaia portal with the use of this disruptive technology in various sectors.

In conclusion, the collaboration between councils and municipalities makes it possible to generate greater cohesion in the opening of data throughout the territory, ensuring that all municipalities, regardless of their size or resources, have access to the necessary tools and knowledge. However, local councils also have their technical and resource limitations, so this is an area where further progress needs to be made, with a focus on raising awareness of the benefits of open data and collaboration between institutions.

There is no doubt that digital skills training is necessary today. Basic digital skills are essential to be able to interact in a society where technology already plays a cross-cutting role. In particular, it is important to know the basics of the technology for working with data.

In this context, public sector workers must also keep themselves constantly updated. Training in this area is key to optimising processes, ensuring information security and strengthening trust in institutions.

In this post, we identify digital skills related to open data aimed at both publishing and using open data. Not only did we identify the professional competencies that public employees working with open data must have and maintain, we also compiled a series of training resources that are available to them.

Professional competencies for working with data

A working group was set up in 2024 National Open Data Gathering with one objective: to identify the digital competencies required of public administration professionals working with open data. Beyond conclusions of this event of national relevance, the working group defined profiles and roles needed for data opening, gathering information on their roles and the skills and knowledge required. The main roles identified were:

• Role responsible: has technical responsibility for the promotion of open data policies and organises activities to define policies and data models. Some of the skills required are:
  
  • Leadership in promoting strategies to drive data openness.
  • Driving the data strategy to drive openness with purpose.
  • Understand the regulatory framework related to data in order to act within the law throughout the data lifecycle.
  • Encourage the use of tools and processes for data management.
  • Ability to generate synergies in order to reach a consensus on cross-cutting instructions for the entire organisation.
• Technical role of data entry technician (ICT profile): carries out implementation activities more closely linked to the management of systems, extraction processes, data cleansing, etc. EThis profile must have knowledge of, for example:
  
  • How to structure the dataset, the metadata vocabulary, data quality, strategy to follow...
  • Be able to analyse a dataset and identify debugging and cleaning processes quickly and intuitively.
  • Generate data visualisations, connecting databases of different formats and origins to obtain dynamic and interactive graphs, indicators and maps.
  • Master the functionalities of the platform, i.e. know how to apply technological solutions for open data management or know techniques and strategies to access, extract and integrate data from different platforms.
• Open data functional role (technician of a service): executes activities more related to the selection of data to be published, quality, promotion of open data, visualisation, data analytics, etc. For example:
  
  • Handling visualisation and dynamisation tools.
  • Knowing the data economy and knowing the information related to data in its full extent (generation by public administrations, open data, infomediaries, reuse of public information, Big Data, Data Driven, roles involved, etc.).
  • To know and apply the ethical and personal data protection aspects that apply to the opening of data.
• Data use by public workers: this profile carries out activities on the use of data for decision making, basic data analytics, among others. In order to do so, it must have these competences:
  
  • Navigation, search and filtering of data.
  • Data assessment.
  • Data storage and export
  • Data analysis and exploitation.

In addition, as part of this challenge to increase capacities for open data, a list of free trainings and guides on open data and data analyticswas developed. We compile some of them that are available online and in open format.

Figure 1. Table of own elaboration with training resources. Source: https://encuentrosdatosabiertos.es/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Reto-2.pdf

INAP''s continuing professional development training offer

The Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública (INAP) has a Training Activities Programme for 2025, framed in the INAP Learning Strategy 2025-2028.. This training catalogue includes more than 180 activities organised in different learning programmes, which will take place throughout the year with the aim of strengthening the competences of public staff in key areas such as open data management and the use of related technologies.

INAP''s 2025 training programme offers a wide range of courses aimed at improving digital skills and open data literacy. Some of the highlighted trainings include:

• Fundamentals and tools of data analysis.
• Introduction to Oracle SQL.
• Open data and re-use of information.
• Data analysis and visualisation with Power BI.
• Blockchain: technical aspects.
• Advanced Python programming.

These courses, aimed at different profiles of public employees, from open data managers to information management technicians, allow to acquire knowledge on data extraction, processing and visualisation, as well as on strategies for the opening and reuse of open data in the Public Administration.  You can consult the full catalogue here..

Other training references

Some public administrations or entities offer training courses related to open data. For more information on its training offer, please see the catalogue with the programmed courses on offer.

• FEMP''s Network of Local Entities for Transparency and Citizen Participation: https://redtransparenciayparticipacion.es/.
• Government of Aragon: Aragon Open Data: https://opendata.aragon.es/informacion/eventos-de-datos-abiertos
• School of Public Administration of Catalonia (EAPC): https://eapc.gencat.cat/ca/inici/index.html#googtrans(ca|es
• Diputació de Barcelona: http://aplicacions.diba.cat/gestforma/public/cercador_baf_ens_locals
• Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN): https://cursos.cnig.es/

In short, training in digital skills, in general, and in open data, in particular, is a practice that we recommend at datos.gob.es. Do you need a specific training resource? Write to us in comments, we''ll read you!

The Sistema Nacional de Publicidad de Subvenciones y Ayudas Públicas (SNPSAP) is a tool that contributes to the transparency, dissemination and re-use of data related to public subsidies and grants. This system centralises all the information on calls for applications and concessions of subsidies and public aid approved by the General State Administration, the autonomous communities and local entities.

Origins of the project

We have to go back to 2014 to find the beginning of this project. That year saw a reform of the 2003 General Law on Subsidies (Law 38/2003) with a huge impact in two significant respects:

• On the one hand, the National Subsidies Database, which had been created by the aforementioned Law in 2003, became available for full consultation by the managing bodies of subsidies and grants of all public administrations and those others legally authorised.

• Moreover, the National System of Publicity of Public Subsidies and Grants was created as a public website, with free and unrestricted access for all citizens. This complied with the requirements of publicity and transparency of all public subsidies and aid granted in Spain, especially calls for applications and awards, with identification of the beneficiaries. This space began operating on 1 January 2015, offering data from the state administration. The following year it was extended to regional and local administrations, thus covering the entire spectrum of the public sector.

Initial data formats and functionalities

From its origin, there was a serious support for the re-use of data for the society that originates it. Already initially the website allowed  downloading of data in different formats (CSV, XLSX and PDF) that allow their reuse, although limiting the size of the downloads to 10,000 records for performance and technical capacity reasons.

In addition, a alert subscription mechanismwas available from the outset. A citizen or company could - and can - register as many alerts as they need so that the system automatically notifies them when any call of interest to them is published, sending them a link to it. The tedious need to consult the dozens of official newspapers published in Spain on a daily basis to find out about calls for grants and subsidies was thus eliminated at a stroke.

A project in constant evolution to cope with growth

Regulatory developments in the field of aid and subsidies in the European Union, and Spain's accession to the United Nations Open Government Partnership initiative, shaped the growth of the website in successive years, increasing the offer of specific data views (State aid and minimis, large beneficiaries, political parties, etc.), which made it easier for citizens and data reusers to access them.

At the dawn of the pandemic, the system was already supporting 1.3 million visits per year, serving 3.3 million pages of grants and calls for proposals. This posed a challenge in terms of performance, as volumes never foreseen in the initial technical designs were achieved. A deep technological reform was needed to support the high demand for information and service level.

The reform was approached not only from a technological point of view, but also taking into account:

• The new features established in the Royal Decree 130/2019 regulating the National Grants Database.
• The socially demanded need to enable a API-REST interface for downloading information in reusable JSON format to overcome technical limitations.

Characteristics of the current platform

The new website was put into production at the end of November 2023, offering multiple views of calls for proposals (520,000 as of December 2024), grants (27,700,000), State aid awards (5.000,000), grants of minimis (3,190,000), strategic grant plans (1,341), very serious infringements (4), grants to parties (7,580), and grants to large beneficiaries (145,000).

All this information is accessible today via screen, downloadable in PDF, CSV, XSLX and API-REST interface formats in JSON and XML, being freely reusable by infomediary companies and citizens, with no restrictions other than those established by law.

Figure 1. Capture of the website of the National System for the Publicity of Public Subsidies and Grants (SNPSAP).

Since it went into production 11 months ago, the new system has received 7.5 million visits from citizens and businesses. And through the API-REST interface, thousands of downloads are made daily, making a powerful contribution to the dissemination of "raw" subsidy information for reuse by society for all kinds of analyses, studies, etc. In addition, an average of 35,000 e-mail alerts are issued daily to citizens and companies to inform them of new calls for subsidies.

Advantages of SNPSAP

The social dissemination and reuse of all this information eliminates asymmetries and frictions in the markets, and allows operators and citizens to work more efficiently and productively, resulting in higher levels of welfare for society.

The publication of open data allows citizens and organisations not only to know how public funds are distributed, but also to identify new opportunities. This system ensures that all individuals and organisations have equal access to information, regardless of their size or resources, contributing to a more equitable distribution of public support.

The Data Governance Act (DGA) is part of a complex web of EU public policy and regulation, the ultimate goal of which is to create a dataset ecosystem that feeds the digital transformation of the Member States and the objectives of the European Digital Decade:

• A digitally empowered population and highly skilled digital professionals.
• Secure and sustainable digital infrastructures.
• Digital transformation of companies.
• Digitisation of public services.

Public opinion is focusing on artificial intelligence from the point of view of both the opportunities and, above all, the risks and uncertainties. However, the challenge is much more profound as it involves in each of the different layers very diverse technologies, products and services whose common element lies in the need to favour the availability of a high volume of reliable and quality-checked data to support their development.

Promoting the use of data with legislation as leverage

At its inception the Directive 2019/1024 on open data and re-use of public sector information (Open Data Directive), the Directive 95/46/EC on the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and subsequently the Regulation 2016/679 known as the General Data Protection Regulation(GDPR) opted for the re-use of data with full guarantee of rights. However, its interpretation and application generated in practice an effect contrary to its original objectives, clearly swinging towards a restrictive model that may have affected the processes of data generation for its exploitation. The large US platforms, through a strategy of free services - search engines, mobile applications and social networks - in exchange for personal data and with mere consent, obtained the largest volume of personal data in human history, including images, voice and personality profiles.

With the GDPR, the EU wanted to eliminate 28 different ways of applying prohibitions and limitations to the use of data. Regulatory quality certainly improved, although perhaps the results achieved have not been as satisfactory as expected and this is indicated by documents such as the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) 2022 or the Draghi Report (The future of European competitiveness-Part A. A competitiveness strategy for Europe).

This has forced a process of legislative re-engineering that expressly and homogeneously defines the rules that make the objectives possible. The reform of the Open Data Directive, the DGA, the Artificial Intelligence Regulation and the future European Health Data Space (EHDS) should be read from at least two perspectives:

• The first of these is at a high level and its function is aimed at preserving our constitutional values. The regulation adopts an approach focused on risk and on guaranteeing the dignity and rights of individuals, seeking to avoid systemic risks to democracy and fundamental rights.
• The second is operational, focusing on safe and responsible product development. This strategy is based on the definition of process engineering rules for the design of products and services that make European products a global benchmark for robustness, safety and reliability.

A Practical Guide to the Data Governance Law

Data protection by design and by default, the analysis of risks to fundamental rights, the development process of high-risk artificial intelligence information systems validated by the corresponding bodies or the processes of access and reuse of health data are examples of the legal and technological engineering processes that will govern our digital development. These are not easy procedures to implement. The European Union is therefore making a significant effort to fund projects such as TEHDAS, EUHubs4Data or Quantum , which operate as a testing ground. In parallel, studies are carried out or guides are published, such as the Practical Guide to the Data Governance Law.

This Guide recalls the essential objectives of the DGA:

• Regulate the re-use of certain publicly owned data subject to the rights of third parties ("protected data", such as personal data or commercially confidential or proprietary data).
• Boost data sharing by regulating data brokering service providers.
• Encourage the exchange of data for altruistic purposes.
• Establish the European Data Innovation Board to facilitate the exchange of best practices.

The DGA promotes the secure re-use of data through various measures and safeguards. These focus on the re-use of data from public sector bodies, data brokering services and data sharing for altruistic purposes.

To which data does it apply? Legitimation for the processing of protected data held by public sector bodies

In the public sector they are protected:

• Confidential business data, such as trade secrets or know-how.
• Statistically confidential data.
• Data protected by the intellectual property rights of third parties.
• Personal data, insofar as such data do not fall within the scope of the Open Data Directive when irreversible anonymisation is ensured and no special categories of data are concerned.

An essential starting point should be underlined: as far as personal data are concerned, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the rules on privacy and electronic communications (Directive 2002/58/EC) also apply. This implies that, in the event of a collision between them and the DGA, the former will prevail.

Moreover, the DGA does not create a right of re-use or a new legal basis within the meaning of the GDPR for the re-use of personal data. This means that Member State or Union law determines whether a specific database or register containing protected data is open for re-use in general. Where such re-use is permitted, it must be carried out in accordance with the conditions laid down in Chapter I of the DGA.

Finally, they are excluded from the scope of the DGA:

• Data held by public companies, museums, schools and universities.
• Data protected for reasons of public security, defence or national security.
• Data held by public sector bodies for purposes other than the performance of their defined public functions.
• Exchange of data between researchers for non-commercial scientific research purposes.

Conditions for re-use of data

It can be noted that in the area of re-use of public sector data:

▪ The DGA establishes rules for the re-use of protected data, such as personal data, confidential commercial data or statistically sensitive data.

▪ It does not create a general right of re-use, but establishes conditions where national or EU law allows such re-use.

▪ The conditions for access must be transparent, proportionate and objective, and must not be used to restrict competition. The rule mandates the promotion of data access for SMEs and start-ups, and scientific research. Exclusivity agreements for re-use are prohibited, except in specific cases of public interest and for a limited period of time.

▪ Attributes to public sector bodies the duty to ensure the preservation of the protected nature of the data. This will require the deployment of intermediation methodologies and technologies. Anonymisation and access through secure processing environments (Secure processing environments or SPE) can play a key role. The former is a risk elimination factor, while PES can define a processing ecosystem that provides a comprehensive service offering to re-users, from the cataloguing and preparation of datasets to their analysis. The Spanish Data Protection Agency has published an Approach to data spaces from a GDPR perspective that includes recommendations and methodologies in this area.

▪ Re-users are subject to obligations of confidentiality and non-identification of data subjects. In case of re-identification of personal data, the re-user must inform the public sector body and there may be security breach notification obligations.

▪ Insofar as the relationship is established directly between the re-user and the public sector body, there may be cases in which the latter must provide support to the former for the fulfilment of certain duties:

• To obtain, if necessary, the consent of the persons concerned for the processing of personal data.
• In case of unauthorised use of non-personal data, the re-user shall inform the legal entities concerned. The public sector body that initially granted the permission for re-use may provide support if necessary.

▪ International transfers of personal data are governed by the GDPR. For international transfers of non-personal data, the re-user is required to inform the public sector body and to contractually commit to ensure data protection. However, this is an open question, since, as with the GDPR, the European Commission has the power to:

1. Propose standard contractual clauses that public sector bodies can use in their transfer contracts with re-users.

2. Where a large number of requests for re-use from specific countries justify it, adopt "equivalence decisions" designating these third countries as providing a level of protection for trade secrets or intellectual property that can be considered equivalent to that provided for in the EU.

3. Adopt the conditions to be applied to transfers of highly sensitive non-personal data, such as health data. In cases where the transfer of such data to third countries poses a risk to EU public policy objectives (in this example, public health) and in order to assist public sector bodies granting permissions for re-use, the Commission will set additional conditions to be met before such data can be transferred to a third country.

▪ Public sector bodies may charge fees for allowing re-use. The DGA's strategy aims at sustainability of the system, as fees should only cover the costs of making data available for re-use, such as the costs of anonymisation or providing a secure processing environment. This would include the costs of processing requests for re-use. Member States must publish a description of the main cost categories and the rules used for their allocation.

▪ Natural or legal persons directly affected by a decision on re-use taken by a public sector body shall have the right to lodge a complaint or to seek a judicial remedy in the Member State of that public sector body.

Organisational support

It is entirely possible that public sector bodies offering intermediation services will multiply. This is a complex environment that will require technical and legal support, backstopping and coordination.

To this end, Member States should designate one or more competent bodies whose role is to support public sector bodies granting re-use. The competent bodies shall have adequate legal, financial, technical and human resources to carry out the tasks assigned to them, including the necessary expertise. They are not supervisory bodies, they do not exercise public powers and, as such, the DGA does not set specific requirements as to their status or legal form. In addition, the competent body may be given a mandate to allow re-use itself.

Finally, States must create a Single Point of Information or one-stop shop. This Point will be responsible for transmitting queries and requests to relevant public sector bodies and for maintaining an asset list with an overview of available data resources (metadata). The single information point may be linked to local, regional or sectoral information points where they exist. At EU level, the Commission created the European Register of Protected Data held by the Public Sector (ERPD), a searchable register of information collected by national single points of information to further facilitate the re-use of data in the internal market and beyond.

EU regulations are rules that are complex to implement. Therefore, a special pro-activity is required to contribute to its correct understanding and implementation. The EU Guide to the Deployment of the Data Governance Act is a first tool for this purpose and will allow a better understanding of the objectives and possibilities offered by the DGA.

This episode focuses on data governance and why it is important to have standards, policies and processes in place to ensure that data is correct, reliable, secure and useful. For this purpose, we analyze the Model Ordinance on Data Governance of the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces, known as the FEMP, and its application in a public body such as the City Council of Zaragoza. This will be done by the following guests:

• Roberto Magro Pedroviejo, Coordinator of the Open Data Working Group of the Network of Local Entities for Transparency and Citizen Participation of the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces and civil servant of the Alcobendas City Council.

• María Jesús Fernández Ruiz, Head of the Technical Office of Transparency and Open Government of Zaragoza City Council.

Listen to the full podcast (only available in Spanish)

Summary of the interview

1. What is data governance?

Roberto Magro Pedroviejo: We, in the field of Public Administrations, define data governance as an organisational and technical mechanism that comprehensively addresses issues related to the use of data in our organisation. It covers the entire data lifecycle, i.e. from creation to archiving or even, if necessary, purging and destruction. Its purpose is that data is of quality and available to all those who need it: sometimes it will be only the organisation itself internally, but many other times it will be the general public, re-users, the university environment, etc. Data governance must facilitate the right of access to data. In short, data governance makes it possible to respond to the objective of managing our administration effectively and efficiently and achieving greater interoperability between all administrations.

2. Why is this concept important for a municipality?

María Jesús Fernández Ruiz: Because we have found that, within organisations, both public and private, data collection and management is often carried out without following homogeneous criteria, standards or appropriate techniques. This translates into a difficult and costly situation, which is exacerbated when we try to develop a data space or develop data-related services. Therefore, we need an umbrella that obliges us to manage data, as Roberto has said, effectively and efficiently, following homogeneous standards and criteria, which facilitates interoperability.

3. To meet this challenge, it is necessary to establish a set of guidelines to help local administrations set up a legal framework. For this reason, the FEMP Model Ordinance on Data Governance has been created. What was the process of developing this reference document like?

Roberto Magro Pedroviejo: Within the Open Data Network Group that was created back in 2017, one of the people we have counted on and who has contributed a lot of ideas has been María Jesús, from Zaragoza City Council. We were leaving COVID, just in March 2021, and I remember perfectly the meeting we had in a room lent to us by the Madrid City Council in the Cibeles Palace. María Jesús was in Zaragoza and joined the meeting by videoconference. On that day, seeing what things and what work we could tackle within this multidisciplinary group, María Jesús proposed creating a model ordinance. The FEMP and the Network already had experience in creating model ordinances to try to improve, and above all help, municipalities and local entities or councils to create regulations.

We started working as a multidisciplinary team, led by José Félix Muñoz Soro, from the University of Zaragoza, who is the person who has coordinated the regulatory text that we have published. And a few months later, in January 2022 to be precise, we held a meeting. We met in person at the Zaragoza City Council and there we began to establish the basis for the model ordinance, what type of articles it should have, what type of structure it should have, etc. And we got together a multidisciplinary team, as we said, which included experts in data governance and jurists from the University of Zaragoza, staff from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, colleagues from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, professionals from the local public sphere and journalists who are experts in open data.

The first draft was published in May/June 2022. In addition, it was made available for public consultation through Zaragoza City Council's Citizen Participation platform. We contacted around 100 national experts and received around 30 contributions of improvements, most of which were included, and which allowed us to have the final text by the end of last year, which was passed to the legal department of the FEMP to validate it. The regulations were published in February 2024 and are now available on the Network's website for free download.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the excellent work done by all the people involved in the team who, from their respective points of view, have worked selflessly to create this knowledge and share it with all the Spanish public administrations.

4. What are the expected benefits of the ordinance?

María Jesús Fernández Ruiz: For me, one of the main objectives of the ordinance, and I think it is a great instrument, is that it takes the whole life cycle of the data. It covers from the moment the data is generated, how the data is managed, how the data is provided, how the documentation associated with the data must be stored, how the historical data must be stored, etc. The most important thing is that it establishes criteria for managing the data while respecting its entire life cycle.

The ordinance also establishes some principles, which are not many, but which are very important and which set the tone, which speak, for example, of effective data governance and describe the importance of establishing processes when generating the data, managing the data, providing the data, etc.

Another very important principle, which has been mentioned by Roberto, is the ethical treatment of data. In other words, the importance of collecting data traceability, of seeing where the data is moving and of respecting the rights of natural and legal persons.

Another very important principle that generates a lot of noise in the institutions is that data must be managed from the design phase, the management of data by default. Often, when we start working on data with openness criteria, we are already in the middle or near the end of the data lifecycle. We have to design data management from the beginning, from the source. This saves us a lot of resources, both human and financial.

Another important issue for us and one that we advocate within the ordinance is that administration has to be data-oriented. It has to be an administration that is going to design its policies based on evidence. An administration that will consider data as a strategic asset and will therefore provide the necessary resources.

And another issue, which we often discuss with Roberto, is the importance of data culture. When we work on and publish data, data that is interoperable, that is easy to reuse, that is understood, etc., we cannot stop there, but we must talk about the data culture, which is also included in the ordinance. It is important that we disseminate what is data, what is quality data, how to access data, how to use data. In other words, every time we publish a dataset, we must consider actions related to data culture.

5. Zaragoza City Council has been a pioneer in the application of this ordinance. What has this implementation process been like and what challenges are you facing?

María Jesús Fernández Ruiz: This challenge has been very interesting and has also helped us to improve. It was very fast at the beginning and already in June we were going to present the ordinance to the city government. There is a process where the different parties make private votes on the ordinance and say "this point I like", "this point seems more interesting", "this one should be modified", etc. Our surprise is that we have had more than 50 private votes on the ordinance, after having gone through the public consultation process and having appeared in all the media, which was also enriching, and we have had to respond to these votes. The truth is that it has helped us to improve and, at the moment, we are waiting for it to go to government.

When they tell me how do you feel, María Jesús? The answer is well, we are making progress, because thanks to this ordinance, which is pending approval by the Zaragoza City Council government, we have already issued a series of contracts. One that is extremely important for us: to draw up an inventory of data and information sources in our institution, which we believe is the basic instrument for managing data, knowing what data we have, where they originate, what traceability they have, etc. Therefore, we have not stopped. Thanks to this framework that has not yet been approved, we have been able to make progress on the basis of contracts or something that is basic in an institution: the definition of the professionals who have to participate in data management.

6. You mentioned the need to develop an inventory of datasets and information sources, what kind of datasets are we talking about and what descriptive information should be included for each?

Roberto Magro Pedroviejo: There is a core, let's say a central core, with a series of datasets that we recommend in the ordinance itself, referring to other work done in the open data group, which is to recommend 80 datasets that we could publish in Spanish public administrations. The focus is also on high-value datasets, those that can most benefit municipal management or can benefit by providing social and economic value to the general public and to the business community and reusers. Any administration that wants to start working on the issue of datasets and wonders where to start publishing or managing data has to focus, in my view, on three key areas in a city:

• The personal data, i.e. our beloved census: who are the people living in our city, their ages, gender, postal addresses, etc.
• The urban and territorial data, that is, where these people live, what the territorial delimitation of the municipality is, etc. Everything that has to do with these sets of data related to streets, roads, even sewerage, public roads or lighting, needs to be inventoried, to know where these data are and to have them, as we have already said, updated, structured, accessible, etc.
• And finally, everything that has to do with how the city is managed, of course, with the tax and budget area.

That is: the personal sphere, the territorial sphere and the taxation sphere. That is what we recommend to start with. And in the end, this inventory of datasets describes what they are, where they are, how they are and will be the first basis on which to start building data governance.

María Jesús Fernández Ruiz: Another issue that is also very fundamental, which is included in the ordinance, is to define the master datasets. Just a little anecdote. When creating a spatial data space, the street map, the base cartography and the portal holder are basic. When we got together to work, a technical commission was set up and we considered these to be master datasets for Zaragoza City Council. The quality of the data is determined by a concept in the ordinance, which is respecting the sovereignty of the data: whoever creates the data is the sovereign of the data and is responsible for the quality of the data. Sovereignty must be respected and that determines quality.

We then discovered that, in Zaragoza City Council, we had five different portal identifiers. To improve this situation, we define a descriptive unique identifier which we declare as master data. In this way, all municipal entities will use the same identifier, the same street map, the same cartography, etc. and this will make all services related to the city interoperable.

7. What additional improvements do you think could be included in future revisions of the ordinance?

Roberto Magro Pedroviejo: The ordinance itself, being a regulatory instrument, is adapted to current Spanish and European regulations. In other words, we will have to be very vigilant -we are already - to everything that is being published on artificial intelligence, data spaces and open data. The ordinance will have to be adapted because it is a regulatory framework to comply with current legislation, but if that regulatory framework changes, we will make the appropriate modifications for compliance.

I would also like to highlight two things. There have been more town councils and a university, specifically the Town Council of San Feliu de Llobregat and the University of La Laguna, interested in the ordinance. We have received more requests to know a little more about the ordinance, but the bravest have been the Zaragoza City Council, who were the ones who proposed it and are the ones who are suffering the process of publication and final approval. From this experience that Zaragoza City Council itself is gaining, we will surely all learn, about how to tackle it in each of the administrations, because we copy each other and we can go faster. I believe that, little by little, once Zaragoza publishes the ordinance, other city councils and other institutions will join in. Firstly, because it helps to organise the inside of the house. Now that we are in a process of digital transformation that is not fast, but rather a long process, this type of ordinance will help us, above all, to organise the data we have in the administration. Data and the management of data governance will help us to improve public management within the organisation itself, but above all in terms of the services provided to citizens.

And the last thing I wanted to emphasise, which is also very important, is that, if the data is not of high quality, is not updated and is not metadata-driven, we will do little or nothing in the administration from the point of view of artificial intelligence, because artificial intelligence will be based on the data we have and if it is not correct or updated, the results and predictions that AI can make will be of no use to us in the public administration.

María Jesús Fernández Ruiz: What Roberto has just said about artificial intelligence and quality data is very important. And I would like to add two things that we are learning in implementing this ordinance. Firstly, the need to define processes, i.e. efficient data management has to be based on processes. And another thing that I think we should talk about, and we will talk about within the FEMP, is the importance of defining the roles of the different professionals involved in data management. We are talking about data manager, data provider, technology provider, etc. If I had the ordinance now, I would talk about that definition of the roles that have to be involved in efficient data management. That is, processes and professionals.

Interview clips

ASEDIE, Asociación Multisectorial de la Información, will hold its usual International Conference on the Reuse of Public Sector Information on December 12. This will be its 16th edition and the central theme is "ASEDIE, 25 years driving the data economy". The aim of the meeting is to address the progress made during this time, provide a snapshot of the current situation and discuss barriers and possible solutions for the re-use of public sector information.

When and where does it take place?

The event will be held in a face-to-face format on 12 December 2024 at the National Statistics Institute (INE), located at Avenida de Manoteras 52, in Madrid. Seating is limited, the reception will start at 9:00 and the event will end at 13:40. To attend the event you must register at this link..

What is the programme?

The focus of this edition will be on the reuse of public sector information and on commemorating the 25 years that the ASEDIE Association has been promoting the data economy in Spain.

The session will open at 9:30 a.m. with the inauguration of the event by the President of ASEDIE, Ignacio Jiménez and the President of INE, Elena Manzanera, to welcome the attendees.
The event will feature three round tables:

• The first round table will take place from 9:45 to 10:30 and will deal with 'Artificial Intelligence and data protection coexisting with reuse'. It will feature the participation of Miguel Valle del Olmo, Digital Transformation Advisor of the Permanent Representation of Spain to the European Union and Leonardo Cervera Navas, Secretary General of European Data Protection Supervisor; and will be moderated by Valentín Arce, Vice-president of ASEDIE.

At the end of this thematic block, the ASEDIE 2024 Award will be presented to recognize those individuals, companies or institutions that stand out for the best work or the greatest contribution to innovation and development of the Infomediary sector in the current year.

After a coffee break, the second round table will start at 11:30:

• This second roundtable under the title "Leadership in open data" will bring together leading figures from the public sector to highlight their coordinating role. The event will be attended by Carmen Cabanilla, Director General of Public Governance of the Secretary of State for Public Function; Ruth del Campo, General Data Director and Francisco Javier García Vieira, Director of RedIRIS and Digital Public Services of Red.es.. All this, moderated by Manuel Suarez, Member of the Board of Directors of ASEDIE.
• The third round table on "The reality of open data: quality, governance and access" will start at 12:30 and will be moderated by Carmen de Pablo, Professor at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. This round table will be attended by Fernando Serrano, Advisor to the General Directorate of Cadastre; Joseba Asiain, Director General of the Presidency, Open Government and Relations with the Parliament of the Government of Navarre and Ángela Perez, Director General of Transparency and Quality of the Madrid City Council.

Finally, the event will end with a brief closing speech by Ignacio Jiménez, president of ASEDIE.

You can consult the complete program here.

How can I register?

Attendance is in person with limited seating and registrations can be made on the ASEDIE website.

The 2024 Best Cases Awards of the Public Sector Tech Watch observatory now have finalists. These awards seek to highlight solutions that use emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence or blockchain, in public administrations, through two categories:

• Solutions to improve the public services offered to citizens (Government-to-Citizen or G2C).
• Solutions to improve the internal processes of the administrations themselves (Government-to-Government or G2G).

The awards are intended to create a mechanism for sharing the best experiences on the use of emerging technologies in the public sector and thus give visibility to the most innovative administrations in Europe.

Almost 60% of the finalist solutions are Spanish.

In total, 32 proposals have been received, 14 of which have been pre-selected in a preliminary evaluation. Of these, more than half are solutions from Spanish organisations. Specifically, nine finalists have been shortlisted for the G2G category -five of them Spanish- and five for G2C -three of them linked to our country-.The following is a summary of what these Spanish solutions consist of.

Solutions to improve the internal processes of the administrations themselves.

• Innovation in local government: digital transformation and GeoAI for data management (Alicante Provincial Council).

Suma Gestión Tributaria, of the Diputación de Alicante, is the agency in charge of managing and collecting the municipal taxes of the city councils of its province. To optimise this task, they have developed a solution that combines geographic information systems and artificial intelligence (machine learning and deep learning) to improve training in detection of properties that do not pay taxes. This solution collects data from multiple administrations and entities in order to avoid delays in the collection of municipalities.

• Regional inspector of public infrastructures: monitoring of construction sites (Provincial Council of Bizkaia and Interbiak).

The autonomous road inspector and autonomous urban inspector help public administrations to automatically monitor roads. These solutions, which can be installed in any vehicle, use artificial or computer vision techniques along with information from sensors to automatically check the condition of traffic signs, road markings, protective barriers, etc. They also perform early forecasting of pavement degradation, monitor construction sites and generate alerts for hazards such as possible landslides.

• Application of drones for the transport of biological samples (Centre for Telecommunications and Information Technologies -CTTI-, Generalitat de Catalunya).

This pilot project implements and evaluates a health transport route in the Girona health region. Its aim is to transport biological samples (blood and urine) between a primary health centre and a hospital using drones. As a result, the journey time has been reduced from 20 minutes with ground transport to seven minutes with the use of drones. This has improved the quality of the samples transported, increased flexibility in scheduling transport times and reduced environmental impact.

• Robotic automation of processes in the administration of justice (Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts).

Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts has implemented a solution for the robotisation of administrative processes in order to streamline routine, repetitive and low-risk work. To date, more than 25 process automation lines have been implemented, including the automatic cancellation of criminal records, nationality applications, automatic issuance of life insurance certificates, etc. As a result, it is estimated that more than 500,000 working hourshave been saved.

• Artificial intelligence in the processing of official publications (Official Gazette of the Province of Barcelona and Official Documentation and Publications Service, Barcelona Provincial Council).

CIDO (Official Information and Documentation Search Engine) has implemented an AI system that automatically generates summaries of official publications of the public administrations of Barcelona. Using supervised machine learning and neural networkstechniques, the system generates summaries of up to 100 words for publications in Catalan or Spanish. The tool allows the recording of manual modifications to improve accuracy.

Solutions to improve the public services offered to citizens

• Virtual Desk of Digital Immediacy: bringing Justice closer to citizens through digitalisation (Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts).

The Virtual Digital Immediacy Desktop (EVID) allows remote hearings with full guarantees of legal certainty using blockchain technologies. The solution integrates the convening of the hearing, the provision of documentation, the identification of the participants, the acceptance of consents, the generation of the document justifying the action carried out, the signing of the document and the recording of the session. In this way, legal acts can be carried out from anywhere, without the need to travel and in a simple way, making justice more inclusive, accessible and environmentally friendly. By the end of June 2024, more than 370,000 virtual sessions had been held through EVID.

• Application of Generative AI to make it easier for citizens to understand legal texts (Entitat Autònoma del Diari Oficial i Publicacions -EADOP-, Generalitat de Catalunya).

Legal language is often a barrier that prevents citizens from easily understanding legal texts. To remove this obstacle, the Government is making available to users of the Legal Portal of Catalonia and to the general public the summaries of Catalan law in simple language obtained from generative artificial intelligence. The aim is to have summaries of the more than 14,000 14,000 existing regulatory provisions adapted to clear communication available by the end of the year. The abstracts will be published in Catalan and Spanish, with the prospect of also offering a version in Aranesein the future.

• Emi - Intelligent Employment (Consellería de Emprego, Comercio e Emigración de la Xunta de Galicia).

Emi, Intelligent Employment is an artificial intelligence and big data tool that helps the offices of the Public Employment Service of Galicia to orient unemployed people towards the skills required by the labour market, according to their abilities. AI models make six-month projections of contracts for a particular occupation for a chosen geographical area. In addition, they allow estimating the probability of finding employment for individuals in the coming months.

You can see all the solutions presented here. The winners will be announced at the final event on 28 November. The ceremony takes place in Brussels, but can also be followed online. To do so, you need to register here.

Public Sector Tech Watch: an observatory to inspire new projects

Public Sector Tech Watch (PSTW), managed by the European Commission, is positioned as a "one-stop shop" for all those interested - public sector, policy makers, private companies, academia, etc. - in the latest technological developments to improve public sector performance and service delivery. For this purpose, it has several sections where the following information of interest is displayed:

• Cases: contains examples of how innovative technologies and their associated data are used by public sector organisations in Europe.
• Stories: presents testimonials to show the challenges faced by European administrations in implementing technological solutions.

If you know of a case of interest that is not currently monitored by PSTW, you can register it here. Successful cases are reviewed and evaluated before being included in the database.

In this episode we will delve into the importance of three related categories of high-value datasets. These are Earth observation and environmental data, geospatial data and mobility data. To tell us about them, we have interviewed two experts in the field:

• Paloma Abad Power, Deputy Director of the National Centre for Geographic Information (CNIG).
• Rafael Martínez Cebolla, geographer of the Government of Aragón.

With them we have explored how these high-value datasets are transforming our environment, contributing to sustainable development and technological innovation.

Listen to the full podcast (only available in Spanish)

Summary of the interview

1. What are high-value datasets and why are their important?

Paloma Abad Power: According to the regulation, high-value datasets are those that ensure highest socio-economic potential and, for this, they must be easy to find, i.e. they must be accessible, interoperable and usable. And what does this mean? That means that the datasets must have their descriptions, i.e. the online metadata, which report the statistics and their properties, and which can be easily downloaded or used.

In many cases, these data are often reference data, i.e. data that serve to generate other types of data, such as thematic data, or can generate added value.

Rafael Martínez Cebolla: They could be defined as those datasets that represent phenomena that are useful for decision making, for any public policy or for any action that a natural or legal person may undertake.

In this sense, there are already some directives, which are not so recent, such as the Water Framework Directive or the INSPIRE Directive, which motivated this need to provide shared data under standards that drive the sustainable development of our society.

2. These high-value data are defined by a European Directive and an Implementing Regulation which dictated six categories of high-value datasets. On this occasion we will focus on three of them: Earth observation and environmental data, geospatial data and mobility data. What do these three categories of data have in common and what specific datasets do they cover?

Paloma Abad Power: In my opinion, these data have in common the geographical component, i.e. they are data located on the ground and therefore serve to solve problems of different nature and linked to society.

Thus, for example, we have, with national coverage, the National Aerial Orthophotography Plan (PNOA), which are the aerial images, the System of Land Occupation Information (SIOSE), cadastral parcels, boundary lines, geographical names, roads, postal addresses, protected sites - which can be both environmental and also castles, i.e. historical heritage- etc. And these categories cover almost all the themes defined by the annexes of the INSPIRE directive.

Rafael Martínez Cebolla: It is necessary to know what is pure geographic information, with a direct geographic reference, as opposed to other types of phenomena that have indirect geographic references. In today's world, 90% of information can be located, either directly or indirectly. Today more than ever, geographic tagging is mandatory for any corporation that wants to implement a certain activity, be it social, cultural, environmental or economic: the implementation of renewable energies, where I am going to eat today, etc. These high-value datasets enhance these geographical references, especially of an indirect nature, which help us to make a decision.

3. Which agencies publish these high-value datasets? In other words, where could a user locate datasets in these categories?

Paloma Abad Power: It is necessary to highlight the role of the National Cartographic System, which is an action model in which the organisations of the NSA (National State Administration) and the autonomous communities participate. It is coordinating the co-production of many unique products, funded by these organisations.

These products are published through interoperable web services. They are published, in this case, by the National Center for Geographic Information (CNIG), which is also responsible for much of the metadata for these products.

They could be located through the Catalogues of the IDEE (Spatial Data Infrastructure of Spain) or the Official Catalogue of INSPIRE Data and Services, which is also included in datos.gob.es and the European Data Portal.

And who can publish? All bodies that have a legal mandate for a product classified under the Regulation. Examples: all the mapping bodies of the Autonomous Communities, the General Directorate of Cadastre, Historical Heritage, the National Statistics Institute, the Geological and Mining Institute (IGME), the Hydrographic Institute of the Navy, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPA), the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, etc. There are a multitude of organisations and many of them, as I have mentioned, participate in the National Cartographic System, provide the data and generate a single service for the citizen.

Rafael Martínez Cebolla: The National Cartographic System defines very well the degree of competences assumed by the administrations. In other words, the public administration at all levels provides official data, assisted by private enterprise, sometimes through public procurement.

The General State Administration goes up to scales of 1:25,000 in the case of the National Geographic Institute (IGN) and then the distribution of competencies for the rest of the scales is for the autonomous or local administrations. In addition, there are a number of actors, such as hydrographic confederations, state departments or the Cadastre, which have under their competences the legal obligation to generate these datasets.

For me it is an example of how it should be distributed, although it is true that it is then necessary to coordinate very well, through collegiate bodies, so that the cartographic production is well integrated.

Paloma Abad Power: There are also collaborative projects, such as, for example, a citizen map, technically known as an X, Y, Z map, which consists of capturing the mapping of all organisations at national and local level. That is, from small scales 1:1,000,000 or 1:50,000,000 to very large scales, such as 1:1000, to provide the citizen with a single multi-scale map that can be served through interoperable and standardised web services.

4. Do you have any other examples of direct application of this type of data?

Rafael Martínez Cebolla:  A clear example was seen with the pandemic, with the mobility data published by the National Institute of Statistics. These were very useful data for the administration, for decision making, and from which we have to learn much more for the management of future pandemics and crises, including economic crises. We need to learn and develop our early warning systems.

I believe that this is the line of work: data that is useful for the general public. That is why I say that mobility has been a clear example, because it was the citizen himself who was informing the administration about how he was moving.

Paloma Abad Power: I am going to contribute some data. For example, according to statistics from the National Cartographic System services, the most demanded data are aerial images and digital terrain models. In 2022 there were 8 million requests and in 2023 there were 19 million requests for orthoimages alone.

Rafael Martínez Cebolla: I would like to add that this increase is also because things are being done well. On the one hand, discovery systems are improved. My general feeling is that there are many successful example projects, both from the administration itself and from companies that need this basic information to generate their products.

There was an application that was generated very quickly with de-escalation - you went to a website and it told you how far you could walk through your municipality - because people wanted to get out and walk. This example arises from spatial data that have moved out of the public administration. I believe that this is the importance of successful examples, which come from people who see a compelling need.

5. And how do you incentivise such re-use?

Rafael Martínez Cebolla: I have countless examples. Incentivisation also involves promotion and marketing, something that has sometimes failed us in the public administration. You stick to certain competences and it seems that just putting it on a website is enough. And that is not all.

We are incentivising re-use in two ways. On the one hand, internally, within the administration itself, teaching them that geographic information is useful for planning and evaluating public policies. And I give you the example of the Public Health Atlas of the Government of Aragon, awarded by an Iberian society of epidemiology the year before the pandemic. It was useful for them to know what the health of the Aragonese was like and what preventive measures they had to take.

As for the external incentives, in the case of the Geographic Institute of Aragon, it was seen that the profile entering the geoportal was very technical. The formats used were also very technical, which meant that the general public was not reached. To solve this problem, we promoted portals such as the IDE didactica, a portal for teaching geography, which reaches any citizen who wants to learn about the territory of Aragon.

Paloma Abad Power: I would like to highlight the economic benefit of this, as was shown, for example, in the economic study carried out by the National Centre for Graphic Information with the University of Leuven to measure the economic benefit of the Spatial Data Infrastructure of Spain. It measure the benefit of private companies using free and open services, rather than using, for example, Google Maps or other non-open sources..

Rafael Martínez Cebolla: For better and for worse, because the quality of the official data sometimes we wish it were better. Both Paloma in the General State Administration and I in the regional administration sometimes know that there are official data where more money needs to be invested so that the quality of the data would be better and could be reusable.

But it is true that these studies are key to know in which dimension high-value datasets move. That is to say, having studies that report on the real benefit of having a spatial data infrastructure at state or regional level is, for me, key for two things: for the citizen to understand its importance and, above all, for the politician who arrives every N years to understand the evolution of these platforms and the revolution in geospatial information that we have experienced in the last 20 years.

6. The Geographic Institute of Aragon has also produced a report on the advantages of reusing this type of data, is that right? 

Rafael Martínez Cebolla: Yes, it was published earlier this year. We have been doing this report internally for three or four years, because we knew we were going to make the leap to a spatial knowledge infrastructure and we wanted to see the impact of implementing a knowledge graph within the data infrastructure. The Geographic Institute of Aragon has made an effort in recent years to analyse the economic benefit of having this infrastructure available for the citizens themselves, not for the administration. In other words, how much money Aragonese citizens save in their taxes by having this infrastructure. Today we know that having a geographic information platform saves approximately 2 million euros a year for the citizens of Aragon.

I would like to see the report for the next January or February, because I think the leap will be significant. The knowledge graph was implemented in April last year and this gap will be felt in the year ahead. We have noticed a significant increase in requests, both for viewing and downloading.

Basically from one year to the next, we have almost doubled both the number of accesses and downloads. This affects the technological component: you have to redesign it. More people are discovering you, more people are accessing your data and, therefore, you have to dedicate more investment to the technological component, because it is being the bottleneck.

7. What do you see as the challenges to be faced in the coming years?

Paloma Abad Power: In my opinion, the first challenge is to get to know the user in order to provide a better service. The technical user, the university students, the users on the street, etc. We are thinking of doing a survey when the user is going to use our geographic information. But of course, such surveys sometimes slow down the use of geographic information. That is the great challenge: to know the user in order to make services more user-friendly, applications, etc. and to know how to get to what they want and give it to them better.

There is also another technical challenge. When the spatial infrastructures began, the technical level was very high, you had to know what a visualisation service was, the metadata, know the parameters, etc. This has to be eliminated, the user can simply say I want, for example, to consult and visualise the length of the Ebro river, in a more user-friendly way. Or for example the word LiDAR, which was the Italian digital model with high accuracy. All these terms need to be made much more user-friendly.

Rafael Martínez Cebolla: Above all, let them be discovered. My perception is that we must continue to promote the discovery of spatial data without having to explain to the untrained user, or even to some technicians, that we must have a data, a metadata, a service..... No, no. Basically it is that generalist search engines know how to find high-value datasets without knowing that there is such a thing as spatial data infrastructure.

It is a matter of publishing the data under friendly standards, under accessible versions and, above all, publishing them in permanent URIs, which are not going to change. In other words, the data will improve in quality, but will never change.

And above all, from a technical point of view, both spatial data infrastructures and geoportals and knowledge infrastructures have to ensure that high-value information nodes are related to each other from a semantic and geographical point of view. I understand that knowledge networks will help in this regard. In other words, mobility has to be related to the observation of the territory, to public health data or to statistical data, which also have a geographical component. This geographical semantic relationship is key for me.

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Interview clips

The Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Administration has launched a grant for the development of Data Spaces for Intelligent Urban Infrastructures (EDINT). This project envisages the creation of a multi-sectoral data space that will bring together all the information collected by local authorities. The project will be carried out through the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP) and will receive a subsidy of 13 million euros, as stated in the Official State Gazette published on Wednesday 16 October.

A single point of access to smart urban infrastructure data

Thanks to this action, it will be possible to finance, develop and manage a multisectoral data space that will bring together all the information collected by the different Spanish municipalities in an aggregated and centralized manner. It should be recalled that data spaces enable the voluntary sharing of information in an environment of sovereignty, trust and security, established through integrated governance, organisational, regulatory and technical mechanisms.

EDINT will act as a single neutral point of access to smart city information, enabling companies, researchers and administrations to access information without the need to visit the data infrastructure of each municipality, increasing agility and reducing costs. In addition, it will allow connection with other sectoral data spaces.

The sharing of this data will help to accelerate technological innovation processes in smart city products and services. Businesses and organisations will also be able to use the data for the improvement of processes and efficiency of their activities.

The Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP) will implement the project.

The EDINT project will be articulated through the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces.The FEMP reaches more than 95% of the Spanish population, which gives it a deep and close knowledge of the needs and challenges of data management in Spanish municipalities and provinces.

Among the actions to be carried out are:

• Development and implementation of the data infrastructure and platform, which will store data from existing Smart City systems.
• Incorporation of local entities and companies interested in accessing the data space.
• Development of three use cases on the data space, focusing on the following areas: "smart mobility", "managed cities and territories" and "mapping the economic and social activity of cities and territories".
• Definition of the governance schemes that will regulate the operation of the project, guaranteeing the interoperability of the data, as well as the management of the complex network of stakeholders (companies, academic institutions and governmental organisations).
• Setting up Centres of Excellence and Data Offices, with physical workspaces. These centres will be responsible for the collection of lessons learned and the development of new use cases.

It is a ongoing and sustainable long-term project that will be open to the participation of new actors, be they data providers or data consumers, at any time.

A project aligned with Europe

This assistance is part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, funded by the European Union-Next Generation EU. The creation of data spaces is envisaged in the European Data Strategy, as a mechanism to establish a common data market to ensure the European Union's leadership in the global data economy. In particular, it aims to achieve the free flow of information for the benefit of businesses, researchers and public administrations.

Moreover, data spaces are a key area of the Digital Spain 2026 Agenda, which is driving, among other issues, the acceleration of the digitalisation processes of the productive fabric. To this end, sectoral and data-intensive digitalisation projects are being developed, especially in strategic economic sectors for the country, such as agri-food, mobility, health, tourism, industry, commerce and energy.

The launch of the EDINT project joins other previously launched initiatives such as funding and development grants for use cases and data space demonstrators, which encourage the promotion of public-private sectoral innovation ecosystems.

Sharing data under conditions of sovereignty, control and security not only allows local governments to improve efficiency and decision-making, but also drives the creation of creative solutions to various urban challenges, such as optimising traffic or improving public services. In this sense, actions such as the Data Spaces for Smart Urban Infrastructures represent a step forward in achieving smarter, more sustainable and efficient cities for all citizens.

A digital twin is a virtual, interactive representation of a real-world object, system or process. We are talking, for example, about a digital replica of a factory, a city or even a human body. These virtual models allow simulating, analysing and predicting the behaviour of the original element, which is key for optimisation and maintenance in real time.

Due to their functionalities, digital twins are being used in various sectors such as health, transport or agriculture. In this article, we review the benefits of their use and show two examples related to open data.

Advantages of digital twins

Digital twins use real data sources from the environment, obtained through sensors and open platforms, among others. As a result, the digital twins are updated in real time to reflect reality, which brings a number of advantages:

• Increased performance: one of the main differences with traditional simulations is that digital twins use real-time data for modelling, allowing better decisions to be made to optimise equipment and system performance according to the needs of the moment.
• Improved planning: using technologies based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the digital twin can analyse performance issues or perform virtual "what-if" simulations. In this way, failures and problems can be predicted before they occur, enabling proactive maintenance.
• Cost reduction: improved data management thanks to a digital twin generates benefits equivalent to 25% of total infrastructure expenditure. In addition, by avoiding costly failures and optimizing processes, operating costs can be significantly reduced. They also enable remote monitoring and control of systems from anywhere, improving efficiency by centralizing operations.
• Customization and flexibility: by creating detailed virtual models of products or processes, organizations can quickly adapt their operations to meet changing environmental demands and individual customer/citizen preferences. For example, in manufacturing, digital twins enable customized mass production, adjusting production lines in real time to create unique products according to customer specifications. On the other hand, in healthcare, digital twins can model the human body to customize medical treatments, thereby improving efficacy and reducing side effects.
• Boosting experimentation and innovation: digital twins provide a safe and controlled environment for testing new ideas and solutions, without the risks and costs associated with physical experiments. Among other issues, they allow experimentation with large objects or projects that, due to their size, do not usually lend themselves to real-life experimentation.
• Improved sustainability: by enabling simulation and detailed analysis of processes and systems, organizations can identify areas of inefficiency and waste, thus optimizing the use of resources. For example, digital twins can model energy consumption and production in real time, enabling precise adjustments that reduce consumption and carbon emissions.

Examples of digital twins in Spain

The following three examples illustrate these advantages.

GeDIA project: artificial intelligence to predict changes in territories

GeDIA is a tool for strategic planning of smart cities, which allows scenario simulations. It uses artificial intelligence models based on existing data sources and tools in the territory.

The scope of the tool is very broad, but its creators highlight two use cases:

1. Future infrastructure needs: the platform performs detailed analyses considering trends, thanks to artificial intelligence models. In this way, growth projections can be made and the needs for infrastructures and services, such as energy and water, can be planned in specific areas of a territory, guaranteeing their availability.
2. Growth and tourism: GeDIA is also used to study and analyse urban and tourism growth in specific areas. The tool identifies patterns of gentrification and assesses their impact on the local population, using census data. In this way, demographic changes and their impact, such as housing needs, can be better understood and decisions can be made to facilitate equitable and sustainable growth.

This initiative has the participation of various companies and the University of Malaga (UMA), as well as the financial backing of Red.es and the European Union.

Digital twin of the Mar Menor: data to protect the environment

The Mar Menor, the salt lagoon of the Region of Murcia, has suffered serious ecological problems in recent years, influenced by agricultural pressure, tourism and urbanisation.

To better understand the causes and assess possible solutions, TRAGSATEC, a state-owned environmental protection agency, developed a digital twin. It mapped a surrounding area of more than 1,600 square kilometres, known as the Campo de Cartagena Region. In total, 51,000 nadir images, 200,000 oblique images and more than four terabytes of LiDAR data were obtained.

Thanks to this digital twin, TRAGSATEC has been able to simulate various flooding scenarios and the impact of installing containment elements or obstacles, such as a wall, to redirect the flow of water. They have also been able to study the distance between the soil and the groundwater, to determine the impact of fertiliser seepage, among other issues.

Challenges and the way forward

These are just two examples, but they highlight the potential of an increasingly popular technology. However, for its implementation to be even greater, some challenges need to be addressed, such as initial costs, both in technology and training, or security, by increasing the attack surface. Another challenge is the interoperability problems that arise when different public administrations establish digital twins and local data spaces. To address this issue further, the European Commission has published a guide that helps to identify the main organisational and cultural challenges to interoperability, offering good practices to overcome them.

In short, digital twins offer numerous advantages, such as improved performance or cost reduction. These benefits are driving their adoption in various industries and it is likely that, as current challenges are overcome, digital twins will become an essential tool for optimising processes and improving operational efficiency in an increasingly digitised world.