How to facilitate interoperability in an open data portal: the example of Aragón Open Data

The Open Data initiative of the Government of Aragon was created by an agreement in 2012 with the aim of creating economic value in the ICT Sector through the reuse of public information, the increase of transparency and the promotion of innovation. All this, in order to boost the development of information society and data interoperability in the Administration. Thanks to this agreement, open data is incorporated into the strategies of the Government of Aragon, who is committed to the effective opening of public data that they hold, understanding as public all data not subject to restrictions of privacy, security or property.

In this context, in 2013, the open data web portal of the Government of Aragon was launched. Since then, Aragón Open Data underwent an exponential growth, driven by the unit responsible for its management, the current General Directorate of Electronic Administration and Information Society, and, of course, by the different data providers: public units, mostly from the Autonomous government. These providers offer their information under open data philosophy from a single access point.

Since the creation of the portal, more services have been developed, such as Aragopedia, Budget or Open Analytics Data. All of them are related to open data reuse and disposition through services that facilitate its use and interpretation. In this line, Aragón Open Data offers diverse applications and training materials, as well as APIs and services that add value to data. Due to these projects, the initiative was selected as the only Spanish experience in the Open Data Leader's Network, held in London in 2016.

The most downloaded resources of the portal include: Cartographic download service e: 1/1000 by municipality, Government of Aragon Contracts, list of municipalities of Aragon or annual holiday calendars of the Autonomous Community and its provinces.

In this wide and diverse framework, in 2016, Aragón Open Data also began a work of identification and integration of the diversity of data generated by the Government of Aragon, in order to facilitate its disposition and opening. The first step was to create an ontology, the Interoperable Information Structure of Aragón EI2A, with the collaboration of the units that possess, create and manage data, participating different areas of the Government of Aragon such as agriculture, finance, culture, geographic information or environment, among others.

The Interoperable Information Structure of Aragón (EI2A) homogenizes structures, vocabularies and characteristics within the framework of Aragón Open Data to mostly resolve the problem of data diversity and heterogeneity in the Administration. A heterogeneity that is a real reflection of the reality and competences of the Administration, but which hinders its opening and reuse.

The EI2A describes the conceptual and logical data model generated by the Government of Aragon, representing entities, properties and relationships. The structure is intended to support data interoperability through its standardization. The Interoperable Information Structure of Aragon aims to relate the content and elements of the different data sets so that data can be standardized and exploited jointly in the Government of Aragon, by combining, simplifying and homogenizing them, regardless of the origin, purpose, model, entities and relationships.

It is in 2017 and 2018 when the EI2A becomes a reality due to Aragón Open Data Pool project. Aragón Open Data Pool is a pilot and innovative project that demonstrates the importance of centralizing and publish data to drive its use and exploitation. Open Data Pool is available since December 2018, based on EI2A.

As a result: more than 140 sources of well-differentiated organisms and purposes, which were previously open in Aragon Open Data (API GA_OD_Core), have been standardized according to the EI2A to be exploited together and offered in a simple way, from a single point of access and with the same query criteria.

This project data are aligned with the semantic web standards for its exploitation, consultation and use (SPARQL endpoint), which is its real potential. This makes data consulting and use possible, regardless of their characteristics and vocabularies. It even allows federating data from portals of different administrations such as Aragón Open Data (under EI2A) and Open Data Euskadi (under ELI).

Another noteworthy aspect is that it is oriented to a non-technical user, by allowing a intuitive and simple navigation using data relationships, putting interoperability into practice through the relation of diverse data using a normal navigation web.

This project has helped to better understand the reality of data incorporated into Aragón Open Data Pool under the EI2A, and confirm the need of data normalization in the production-point, to latter, open and offer them in Aragón Open Data, facilitating their use and reuse, both inside and outside the Administration. But we need a change, sought by data interoperability and reuse guidelines, to open a unique data access point in the Government of Aragon, which today corresponds to a regulatory project. Among its axes of action, this project aim to better identify data, improve its quality at source, and internally support the process from the creation of the data by the different production units, until its publication in Aragón Open Data. In this way, they seek to continue growing, improving and orienting theirselves so that any interested party, institutions, developers or infomediary company can use the information, data and services available for any of their interests, thus contributing to the development of the information society.