The Regional Strategy for Open Data promotion of the Region of Murcia

The open data portal of the Region of Murcia was born at the end of 2014, as a common access point to integrate data from all the Administrations, entities and public organisms of the Region. In this way, users could access in a simple way, not only to regional administration data sets, but also to town halls and public universities information.

Currently, the portal has more than 600 data sets. The most downloaded and visited are those related to tourism and leisure. In addition, applications like RegMurcia, with all the cultural agenda of the region, have been created using these data. But getting there took a lot of work.

As we already know, launching an open data initiative entails a large amount of prior preparation, as well as the need to establish mechanisms that guarantee the quality and sustainability of the portal. For this reason, from datos.gob.es we have asked proffesionals in charge of the Open Data Initiative of the Regional Government of Murcia to tell us how their experience was.

In the attached document, "The Open Data Regional Strategy of the Region of Murcia and its alignment with the open government policy", Jose David Hernández González, Director, and Ignacio Ballesta Germán, Consultant Technician of the Transparency and Citizen Participation Office of the CARM, explains the steps that the regional government took to promote open data publication.

One of the first steps was to perform an internal audit of the information resources, which served to set the criteria for data publication. The audit culminated in the commitment to publish open data by the ministries data managers, as well as the implementation of technical and organizational protocols that facilitated data integration. In addition, a common strategy was adopted to promote the publication and reuse of data.

From the Regional Open Data Strategy, approved in 2016 by the Governing Council of the Region of Murcia to promote an advanced policy of open data in the region as a whole; until the First Open Government Plan, which set as one of its objectives the generation of value through the use of open data, the regional government of Murcia has made clear its commitment to open data. One of the key measures was to align the strategies of transparency and open data, setting as a general criterion that each source available in the Transparency Portal should be generated as a reusable data set and not only as textual information readable on the screen or downloadable as an annex .

If you want to know more about the open data policy of the Region of Murcia we encourage you to read the following attached document.