The opening of data in the provincial councils: the example of Gipuzkoa Irekia

The provincial councils and equivalent bodies such as cabildos or island councils are the governing bodies of the provinces and foral territories, responsible for providing legal, economic and technical assistance and cooperation to the municipalities. Their impact is of particular importance in smaller municipalities, with less economic and management capacity, to which they provide services that they could not provide on their own.

In the open data ecosystem, the provincial councils play a very important role. On the one hand, they are promoters of open data in small municipalities, without sufficient resources to carry out these tasks. On the other hand, they have a large amount of valuable local data, which helps to detect singularities and specific needs.

An example of data opening by these organizations can be found in the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa.

The strategic and regulatory framework of Gipuzkoa Irekia: a common access point to the data of various entities of the Provincial Government

The Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa has an open data catalog, the Gipuzkoa Irekia portal. It offers access to multiple datasets resulting from the activity of the Provincial Council itself and other associated entities of Gipuzkoa: the autonomous bodies Uliazpi and Kabia, the trading companies Bidegi, Etorlur, and Izfe, the General Councils of Gipuzkoa, 82 municipalities, 6 associations and the Waste Consortium of Gipuzkoa.

Each entity is autonomously incorporating the data in the Gipuzkoa Irekia repository, which is broken down into two main blocks: information related to transparency and open data. All its activity is framed within the following regulatory and strategic context:

1. The "Norma Foral 4/2019, of March 11, on Good Governance in the framework of the foral public governance", whose objective is to consolidate the implementation of a new model of relationship between the Administration and the citizens.

2. The Open Government Partnership Euskadi initiative, where the main Basque administrations (Basque Government, Provincial Council of Alava, Provincial Council of Bizkaia, Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, City Council of Bilbao, City Council of Donostia, City Council of Vitoria-Gasteiz) have established several joint objectives to advance in the field of open data, such as:

• To advance in the standardization and normalization of data for its opening in a coordinated manner.
• To implement services based on open data that generate public value.
• Promote the culture of inter-administrative work.

3. The Digital Transformation Plan 2021-2025 of the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, which establishes as an objective the development of the global data strategy that allows managing the availability, integrity and security of the data used in the organization. The data governance strategy foresees the creation of a data office whose implementation is in progress.

More than 2,200 datasets available to the public

Under this framework, the portal offers access to multiple datasets on population, health, economy or education, among many others. These data can be found in reusable and downloadable formats.

The working methodology for the publication is based on the information life cycle, a continuous cycle with 4 phases:

• Identification and selection of reusable information.
• Preparation and processing of the datasets.
• Publication.
• Maintenance of the datasets.

The datasets are gradually incorporated into the Gipuzkoa Irekia repository in collaboration with each of the entities responsible for the published data.

The datasets that have been worked on most recently are organized into several areas or families: sustainable mobility, sport and healthy living, and accountability. Among them, it is worth highlighting:

• Sustainable mobility: weekly traffic data, shows weekly data collected by the gauges installed in the main road networks of Gipuzkoa.
• Sport and healthy life: data on school children's participation in school sport activities, Gipuzkoa's federated licenses during the season and estimates of the number of people on Gipuzkoa's beaches.
• Accountability: subsidies granted, provides data on subsidies and grants awarded in competition by the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa.

Currently, the most visited data are those related to urban real estate and those related to taxes on economic activities. Within the publication strategy, importance is being given to the publication of real-time data, the consumption of which allows the creation of services with live data, such as traffic data or hydrological data.

A continuous activity over time

The commitment of the organizations associated with Gipuzkoa Irekia does not end with the publication of the data, but they always have in mind to continue improving functionalities and services. In this sense, the objectives set annually within the strategic plan are:

• Consolidate the publication of data in Gipuzkoa Irekia to facilitate the location and centralized access to open data. Recently, the portal has been updated to reorganize the contents, update the support platform and, in addition, revise the aesthetics of the portal.
• Improve the availability of disaggregated data, in open, standardized and normalized formats, in order to improve the accessibility and exploitation of the data so that they can be processed in an automated way.
• To offer visualizations that facilitate the interpretation of published data.
• Contribute to the implementation of inter-administrative services that are fed with open data by the main Basque public administrations.

Use cases and applications based on Gipuzkoa Irekia data

All datasets can be freely used and redistributed by anyone, as long as the copyright conditions defined in each dataset are respected. Normally, the reuse conditions allow sharing, creating and adapting as long as the origin of the data is cited.

Several departments of the Provincial Council itself, as well as other public entities have taken advantage of these datasets to launch services such as: 

• KulturKlik. This is a common repository that brings together cultural events. The data of the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa have been standardized in order to integrate them automatically.
• Social Observatory of Gipuzkoa Behagi. Shows indicators and visualizations with data on people at risk or in poverty, elderly or disabled, among others.
• Euskadi Traffic. It is an API that provides data on the traffic situation in the Basque Country with information from various administrations. This REST service is focused on application developers and, in general, public data reusers.
• Nik Hondartzak. It is an application that allows to consult during the beach season, in real time, the occupancy level of each beach.

These examples show the value of this more local data for citizens and public institutions. It is therefore not surprising that more and more councils are being encouraged to open their data and generate valuable services based on them.