The number of local governments that continue to bet on developing initiatives that favor the opening of public information to benefit from its numerous advantages continues to grow. We recently saw the example of Gipuzkoa Irekia and today we want to tell you about the case of the initiative Open Data Biscay.

How was this initiative born?

The Biscay Provincial Government's commitment to open data began in 2016, with the approval of the Provincial Regulation 01/2016 by the General Assemblies of Bizkaia. Thanks to this standard, the reuse of public data in open format began to be promoted, as a source of knowledge for citizens and of potential economic development for certain professional activities.

In 2018 the bet of the Biscay Provincial Council for promoting open data materialized with the launch of the portal Open Data Bizkaia, where they began to publish the first data in an open and reusable format. Currently, this portal has been established as an element that provides citizens and reusing agents with access to public information managed by the Bizkaia Provincial Council.

The evolution of Open Data Bizkaia: strategic framework

To frame its activity, the regional government has developed different strategic and legislative initiatives linked to open data. Two examples are:

• The Provincial Plan for Transparency and Open Data 2020-2022, whose objective is offer the citizens of Bizkaia an adaptive, efficient, co-responsible and, especially, open service delivery model at regional level, in which transparency and the reuse of data are effective catalysts for the continuous improvement of management and generation of return of value for the territory.
• The Provincial Decree 106/2020, that regulates the opening of data in Open Data Bizkaia.

What are its main objectives?

More than 800 datasets available to the public

With these objectives in mind, the Open Data Bizkaia portal has been growing continuously. currently offers access to more than 800 datasets related to the public sector, transport, the environment, urban planning and infrastructure or the economy, among many other topics. These multiple datasets They are fruit of the activity of the Provincial Council itself, of the entities of the regional public sector and of 112 local entities of Biscay. Datasets can be founded in the most popular reusable and downloadable formats, such as CSV, XML, JSON, TSV or XLSX.Among the latest developments, it should be noted that the geographical data now also available in WMS, ZIP and KML formats.

As an element to highlight, this portal offers data on the number of visits received and downloads made of their datasets, both from the web and from the API, which allows them to monitor their use. These data are shown through graphic displays and in each of them the user can download said data in CSV format to inform themselves and/or reuse them.

Use cases and applications based on data from Open Data Bizkaia

In order to encourage the use and reuse of open data, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia carries out various actions:

Organization of competitions

Beside BiscayTIK, the Biscay Provincial Council organizes the challenge every year BiscayApp. The purpose of this challenge is none other than to reward proposals for mobile or web applications that, using the datasets of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and/or the municipalities of Bizkaia, provide some type of service for citizens or organisations.

The applications that were presented at the last organized edition covered areas as varied as the management of hydraulic installations, mobility, sustainable tourism, leisure or urban planning or COVID-19. The last three applications that were awarded are:

• Sustainable tourism 3.0: This application collects information of interest about Bizkaia for responsible and environmentally friendly tourism.
• Virtual assistant for the prediction of water pipes: Based on artificial intelligence techniques, it optimizes the planning of maintenance tasks and replacement of pipes in water supply and sanitation networks. This application could help reduce water leaks, which currently account for between "20 and 40%" of drinking water in the network.
• Neural Bikes: This app makes automated predictions in real time, using Machine Learning and Open Data, of the demand for shared bicycles in the province.

Active listening and collaboration with reusers

• Work session with Mondragon University and the University of Deusto
• Session of presentation of Open Data Bizkaia to students the Grade in Business Data Analytics of Mondragon University
• Work session with data analytics companies, channeled through ASEDIE (Multisector Information Association)
• Working session with Basque Center for Applied Mathematics: BCAM

The Provincial Council also reuses their data

The portal data is not only used by external reusers, but that the Provincial Council itself also makes use of them.

In 2020, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia began work on the design of an algorithm for predicting Asian hornet nests based on the history of some data sets such as:

From Open Data Bizkaia they have also developed several dynamic visualizations with budget data, the list of jobs, etc. They can be accessed via this link.

Next steps

Given the progress made, the Provincial Council does not slow down and has set a series of future challenges to address in relation to Open Data Bizkaia:

• Strengthen the services of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia as data generators and promote their internal capabilities in the field of data openness and reuse.
• Design and implement an adequate management model for the open data service that acts as a lever for the generation of internal data analytics dynamics.
• Establish active listening channels and inter-institutional collaborations with reusing agents and other administrations, as well as supporting local and provincial entities in opening data with the aim of deploying a common data opening strategy.
• Promote the development of new services, encourage the generation of talent and promote revitalization activities in the field of data reuse based on Open Data Bizkaia.

This type of initiative, such as that of Open Data Bizkaia, highlights the value of local data for citizens and also for public institutions themselves.