Balance of the Aporta 2021 Initiative

There are only a few hours left until the end of 2021, a year marked once again by the health situation, which has highlighted the importance of updated, accurate and complete information for decision making.

With regard to the Aporta Initiative, this year we have focused not only on the opening of data by public bodies, but also on bringing open data closer to citizens, facilitating its reuse by companies, developers or any user who wishes to do so. To this end, we have launched several actions:

• Launch of the IV Aporta Challenge, which seeks to identify and recognize new ideas and prototypes that use open data. The new edition of the Challenge has focused, unsurprisingly, on the healthcare field. The call was launched in November and will be open until January 25.
• Step-by-step visualizations. One of the new features of 2021 has been the publication of the visualizations section, which includes various works carried out using data from the National Catalog. In each of them, the steps to follow to achieve the result are explained in a simple way: dataset to download, necessary tools and treatments to be carried out. The source code has also been made available to users on github. The objective is that any user can easily replicate the exercise.
• New reports and guides. Documents have been published and updated for both publishers and reusers, focusing on data processing and analysis (Practical Introductory Guide to Exploratory Data Analysis, Data Processing and Visualization Tools and Emerging Technologies and Open Data: Predictive Analytics), trends (The Future of Open Data) or use cases (Data-driven Educational Technology to Improve Learning in the Classroom and at Home).
• New videos and infographics. Videos have also been created to explain to publishers how to make the most of the portal's functionalities and to reusers how to use the API and SPARQL. In the case of infographics, a repository has been created to make them more easily accessible.

In addition, we have continued to bring users the latest developments in the sector. More than 130 new contents have been published in the news, events, innovation blog and interviews sections, and more than 50 new use cases made possible thanks to open data have been made known in the sections on applications and reusing companies.

Another focus has been on listening to and supporting the open data community. The support team has dealt with more than 750 queries from 120 public bodies, which have been helped to resolve their doubts related to open data. We have also approached several data communities, such as R-Hispano, R-Ladies or Hackathon Lovers, to learn first-hand about their work with open data, as well as the challenges and needs they face.

We would like to thank the open data community once again for its support. Thanks to this, during 2021, we have reached 160 publishers, whose efforts have made the National Catalog exceed 50,000 published datasets. In addition, datos.gob.es has received more than one million visits, and datos.gob.es profiles on LinkedIn and Twitter have grown by 9% and 12% respectively. Not to mention that Spain is among the leading countries in open data in Europe for another year, according to the European Data Portal.

Datos.gob.es is the meeting point of the open data ecosystem in Spain, a place where the different voices of public administrations and data users converge. In 2022 we will continue working with all publishers and reusers so that open data continues to advance in Spain.

Happy new year and here's to a successful 2022!

(You can download the accessible version in word here)