Spain, trend setter of open data maturity in Europe 2016

The open data contribute to the political, social and economic sustainability of a country. The European Commission, aware of the value of the re-use of the public sector information for the eurozone growth, tracks regularly the state members in order to asses the progress achieved in their open data policies.

In this way, at the beginning of the year, the European Data Portal published its first report on the assessment of the maturity of the open data ecosystem: a detailed document where the results obtained by the EU28+ in 2015 are shown. Nevertheless, according to the monitoring performed by this initiative, the second edition of this study has been published, which shows the updated data from 2016 in comparison with the previous year.

The measurement is built on two key indicators Open Data Readiness and Portal Maturity, thereby covering the level of development of national activities promoting open data as well as the level of development of national portals.

According to the document’s data, in 2016 the 31 countries assessed in this report progressed by 28.6% in comparison with the results obtained in 2015. In fact, all the nations have completed over 55% of their journey towards the openness of public sector information, showing that they have successfully developed a basic approach to address open data policies. However, significant discrepancies across countries still exist. Though some countries are still in the process of creating a national open data portal, other countries have already launched new initiatives and are redefining their multiannual strategy.

This reports has been accompanied with an interactive panel, published on the European Data Portal, which shows the results of the key performance indicators that assess the open data maturity. These KPIs include the level of development of the national open data policies, an assessment of the available characteristics in these platforms, as well as the expected impact of the open data policies.

This online dashboard includes the information classified by country to help the user compare the existing differences in the openness of public data in the European Union. In this way, it is possible to create slides for each state member (together with Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein) to know all the details as regards their initiatives, catalogues, barriers, best practices, achievements and next steps.

Thanks to the analysis and summary done by the European programme, it is possible to know that Spain is in the first position in the EU, leading the ranking of open data maturity (as shown in the next figure), due to the high scores obtained in the different indicators: norms, policies, national coordination, portal usability, re-use or availability of the open data.

The greatest progress obtained by the country in comparison with 2015 has been the significant increase of open data impact, especially in the economic field. In fact, Spain scored the maximum of 120 points from 90 points scored in the previous year. It should be highlighted that only two countries have been identified as very ready, these are France (84.4%) and Spain (92.2%). Moreover, this last has done a great work to measure the social impact of open data, scoring the 100% of the possible points.