Spain, trend-setter on open data in Europe, according to the European Data Portal

For the fourth consecutive year, the European Data Portal has published the European Open Data Maturity Landscaping 2018. This study gathers the current situation and the progress made by the different European countries in terms of open data.

Experts have identified a number of countries with high performance and a clear strategic focus on open data, such as Spain, that ranks second for the second year in a row. These countries’ priorities demonstrate their deep understanding of open data as a strategic asset to drive digital transformation.

General conclusions

The general results show some heterogeneity both in the speed of transformation, and in the priorities of the European countries analyzed. In addition, the leadership of a few European countries, such as Spain, is highlighted as developers of strategic measures to exploit the value of open data.

This year the report introduces higher granularity to evaluate more rigorously the maturity of open data at country level. To do this, it adds two new study dimensions (impact and quality) to the indicators included in the previous editions (policy and portal). By focusing on these four perspectives, the 2018 report allows a more detailed understanding of each country effort and performance over the past year.

The following figure shows the average scores obtained by the set of European countries in each dimension, which are explained below:

• Policy. This dimension focuses on the presence of specific policies on Open Data at national level, on the existing licencing norms, and the extent of national coordination. According to the study, European countries (EU28) achieve a score of 82% in this dimension. It should be noted that all EU28 countries, except Sweden, have a specific open data policy.
• Portal. This dimension analyses the maturity of the national Open Data portals, including considerations around their functionality, usage, variety of data featured, and the approach to ensuring the portal’s sustainability. In Europe (EU28), the average maturity in this dimension is 63%. One third of European countries get an advanced level of maturity, while the remaining two thirds have a lot more room for improvement.
• Quality. This dimension explores the extent to which national portals have a systematic and automated approach to harvesting, the accuracy and reliability of available data, and the compliance level in terms of the metadata standard DCAT-AP. In the analyzed territory, the level of quality maturity is 62%. Only 7 countries exceed 75%.
• Impact. This dimension analyses the existing approaches and methodology developed at country level to monitor and measure Open Data reuse and impact, as well as the impact of Open Data at country level on four dimensions: political, social, environmental and economic. In this dimension, there's still much more room for improvement, since it currently stands at 50% on average.

The role of Spain

Spain is above the European average in the four indicators analyzed, with 93% in policy, 97% in impact, 78% in portal and 78% in quality. In total, our score is 87%, less than one point below Ireland, which occupies the first position.

The report groups the analyzed countries around 4 maturity groups: beginners, Followers, Fast-trackers and Trend-setter.

Spain is in Trend-setters group. This group is the one that suffer most changes, compared to the previous year: in 2017 there were 15 Trend-setters countries, but only 5 remain in 2018, including Spain.

This group include those countries that have an advanced open data policy in place with a strong coordination throughout the country. According to the report, the national platforms of this type of countries provide a wide range of functionalities to meet the needs of publishers and advanced users. In addition, there are initiatives to promote the publication of high quality data and the compliance with DCAT-AP.

With respect to reuse, in these countries, there are open data ecosystems with a high level of interaction focused on the reuse around data domains. In addition, activities to measure reuse are conducted.

Recommendations

The report ends with a series of recommendations for the different groups of countries that can be used as a "check-list" for the next 12 months. Do not forget that the report also can be used as a benchmark. The countries in the most incipient stages should take the trend-setters as reference to continue advancing at their maturity level.

In the case of trend-setters, such as Spain, the report includes the following recommendations, among others (you can read the complete recommendations here):

• Link to a variety of sources of real-time data and evaluate means of incentivising custodians of real-time data to enable publishing.
• Develop activities to enable data-driven policy-making in their organisation and commission research to showcase the value of reusing open data by the public sector itself.
• Work with training institutions on providing advanced open data courses and training to involve more advanced elements.

In short, the report shows how open data can be used as a strategic asset to transform the world we live. In Spain, we are going in a good direction, but we must continue working to continue in a leading position in Europe.