During the last few years, we have seen more and more Spanish universities betting on the opening of their data. With goals such as improving transparency and promoting the reuse of the information they generated and guarded, open data portals linked to higher education centers have been emerging, many of which have federated with data.gob.es.

These initiatives were individual projects, promoted by pioneering centers that saw in open data a way to share their information with society and promote greater knowledge, as well as the creation of new products and services of value based on their data. During these years, there have been some attempts at harmonization. For example, the Sectoral Commission on Information and Communication Technologies of the Conference of Spanish University Rectors (CRUE-TIC) prepared a manual to guide university entities on the path to open their data, but there was a lack of a joint framework among the universities themselves that would help unify criteria.

With this objective UniversiData was born.

What is UniversiData?

Universidata is a collaborative project oriented and driven by public universities that seeks to promote open data in the higher education sector in Spain in a harmonized way.

The initiative arises from a public-private collaboration between 3 universities (the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos), together with the company Dimetrical. The objective is twofold:

• On the one hand, to create a single access point where the different universities could share their data, facilitating the work of reusers and infomediaries.
• On the other hand, to facilitate the work of publishing data to the universities themselves. Through UniversiData they can publish their data without the need to create their own portal and share the processes of data generation and transformation, with the time and resource savings that this implies.

Universidata es un proyecto colaborativo orientado e impulsado por universidades públicas que busca fomentar los datos abiertos en el sector de la educación superior en España de una forma armonizada.

UniversiData as a single access point

Reusers can find in UniversiData homogeneous and documented contents, which follow the same specification, called "Common Core". Thanks to it, the datasets maintain a common structure, with homogenized metadata. The contents are offered following accepted standards, such as DCAT and DCMI (adopted by NTI RISP), and the most useful formats for reuse such as CSV, XLSX or JSON.

Users can access the data through a search engine. To facilitate their location, the datasets have been classified according to a series of topics. Each dataset can only belong to one category, even if it has different tags that limit the content.  In addition, a free API has been made available to users without the need for registration.

The topics currently available are as follows:

Finally, it should be noted that UniversiDATA includes a laboratory section with examples of analyses carried out with the data it offers, such as the analysis of interurban travel in students or retirement forecasts.

UniversiDATA for data publishers

UniversiData offers a comprehensive and standardized solution for the management, processing, enrichment, automated anonymization and publication of data sets, making it easier for publishers to do their job. The platform is based on open source DKAN. The publication in UniversiDATA helps Universities to comply with the requirements of the Transparency Law 19/2013 and other regional regulations such as the Law of the Community of Madrid 10/2019.

Apart from standardizing the datasets in general formats, UniversiDATA adheres -if they exist- to specific internationally accepted thematic standards, such as Open Fiscal Data Package for public budgets, which allows their integration in portals such as OpenSpending (http://openspending.org/s/?q=universidad), or Open Contracting Data Standard for public procurement processes, datasets in the process of definition by the working group at the time of writing.

A growing project that wants to listen to reusers

UniversiDATA takes its first step with 11 defined and published datasets from a target set of more than 40, and 3 universities actively publishing, making nearly 200 data resources available already at launch.

In its eagerness to grow, more publishing universities and new datasets are expected to be incorporated soon.

In order to continue developing the project, UniversiData considers it essential to listen to the reusers. Therefore, they have enabled different communication channels:

• Users can write comments on each dataset and rate them by "star marker", without the need for registration.
• Periodically, surveys are conducted to find out users' opinions about datasets that should be offered in open access.
• The link to the official information request point is provided on each university's page.
• Users can subscribe through a form on the home page to receive automatic notifications every time new content is published.

Finally, if you have any suggestions, the UniversiDATA team will listen and assist you at universidata@dimetrical.es.

In short, we are before a project that seeks to unify criteria and facilitate the opening of data from universities, and therefore responds to one of the key objectives of the European Data Strategy: the construction of common and interoperable data spaces in a key sector such as data from the university.