Working on the openness of weather data in Spain

In order to publicly present the new API REST AEMET Open Data, which grants access to national meteorological and climatological data, the State Meteorological Agency organized on December 13 an event at its headquarters in Madrid to promote the re-use of both Internal and external information and discuss their utility in the open data community.

Under the motto "Discover the power of open data", Miguel Ángel López, President of AEMET, opened the event highlighting the need to find and work according to a balance model between the cost of generating and making available meteorological information, and limiting the marginal costs recommended by PSI initiatives.

After all, producers in the open data ecosystem coexist with the final users of the information. In order for such coexistence to be fruitful, the data must be effective, efficient and useful - as stated by Cristina Morales Puerta, Deputy Director General of Information Contents.

To this end, the State Agency is committed to open its communication channels to know the opinion of the community and study the feasibility of the open data requested by users. In this way, it would be possible to generate a sound information network among all the participants of the open data ecosystem while creating synergies to further progress in open government and transparency.

Luis Hernández Cuadrado presented the latest edition of the ASEDIE report on the Infomediary Sector, which analyses in detail  the reusable public information companies in Spain, a total of 602 entities, whose activity have total revenues of approximately € 1.4 billion in 2014 compared to € 1 billion in 2013. This meant an average turnover of € 2.27 million per company; focusing mainly on four areas: market studies, finance, geographic information and publishing. In addition, the number of employees in this sector during that year exceeded 15,000 workers, decreasing by 3.2% in comparison with the previous report.

As the last guest expert at the presentation of the event, José María Marcos Espinosa stressed, as Cristina Morales did, the importance of the quality of information published, which should be complete, relevant and, of course, accessible to cover the needs of citizens. To this end, AEMET follows the European INSPIRE Directive and the national LISIGE regulations which ensure that spatial data infrastructures in the EU and Spain are compatible and interoperable in a cross-border and community context.

After the previous speeches, the first of the panels took place, moderated by Fernando Belda Espluges of the State Agency. Four panelists from different sectors (academic, public and business) met to present the expectations, challenges and key aspects of the openness of meteorological information.

In this context, Antonio Rodríguez Pascual as representative of the CNIG – IGN explained to the attendees that the National Geographic Information Center is committed to open data with licenses CC 4.0. On this way to full openness, the CNIG has removed multiple barriers that hindered access to its data making possible to increase the downloads of information collected by the center, surpassing the ten thousand files downloaded this year.

The panellists - Manuel Gértrudix Barrio, Alberto Abella and Oscar Corcho - agreed on highlighting the benefits and especially the potential of open data for teachers and researchers in educational institutions. However, in order to maximize its value, data literacy is necessary and academic initiatives such as the PaGoDa platform, a data management plan for the Madroño Consortium libraries, are needed.

After this debate and the subsequent demonstration of the REST API AEMET OPENDATA, the two forms of access to AEMET OpenData were shown: (graphic access and access for developers), the second panel took place. On this occasion, the moderator Carmen Rus of the State Agency shared with the audience the results of international studies that show that each euro invested in meteorological infrastructure translates into € 7 of economic benefit for society.

Nevertheless, in order for this added value of open data to become a reality, the experts gathered at this session identified a number of needs to be met previously: to make meteorological science more informative (in the words of Emilio Rey Hernández, co-founder and CEO of digitalmete); the liberalization and gratuitousness of the meteorological open data for the development of such science according to Jonathan Gómez and, finally, the development of services that improve the quality of life of the citizens.

The first open data event organized by the State Meteorological Agency was very well received by the 239 participants and eleven speakers who represented all agents of the open data ecosystem: from data providers, information re-users, developers and final users. Thus, this event not only provided an opportunity to continue progressing towards the openness of meteorological and climatological information, but it became a meeting point to analyse the challenges of open publication for public entities such as AEMET and the potential benefits for the infomediary sector and the open data community in general.