Data for better decision-making: the Spanish General State Administration’s efforts through Impulsa DATA

The Spanish General State Administration holds one of the country’s largest data assets. However, for years, the value of this wealth of information has been constrained by fragmented, siloed management, master data that is not always shared across public bodies, insufficient traceability, and costly manual data-cleansing processes. Many of these challenges persist today, highlighting the need to move towards a more robust data governance model. This need is further reinforced by the opportunity created by the redefinition of the European Union’s regulatory framework for data. The Data Act, the Data Governance Act, the Open Data Directive, and the forthcoming Digital Omnibus Regulation all call for further progress in opening up public data and improving its interoperability, in response to the insufficient availability of data under appropriate conditions. At the same time, the development of artificial intelligence has highlighted the growing need for high-quality, well-governed data in order to deliver reliable results.

Impulsa DATA is a project led by the Directorate-General for Data, under the State Secretariat for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence of the Ministry for Digital Transformation and the Civil Service. It was created precisely at the intersection of this existing gap, the new regulatory momentum, and the opportunity provided by the Plan to Promote Sectoral Data Spaces, within the framework of Spain’s Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. Between April 2025 and June 2026, a total of 22 projects were carried out across ministries and public-sector bodies with the aim of advancing the governance and publication of public data, both open data and data subject to authorisation for use.

Impulsa DATA: enablig a data-driven administration

Impulsa DATA has been developed as a strategic initiative that has helped drive the growth of the data economy and promote a new data-driven model within the Spanish General State Administration by fostering value creation from data, a key resource for competitiveness today. Its objective is twofold: to break down internal data silos through robust governance while accelerating the opening up and reuse of public data.

To achieve this, the initiative has been structured around three pillars:

• Centralised coordination: providing a common framework for all participating public bodies, including shared services, templates, and reuse guidelines.
• Specialised implementation: providing expert personnel who have worked directly with each public body on tailored data governance and publication projects.
• Shared technological infrastructure: based on four different technical models—with or without a governance tool and with or without a catalogue tool—all designed to support federation with datos.gob.es.

Common services: the engine driving the project

One of the key elements of Impulsa DATA has been the provision of common services, grouped into four main areas and designed for reuse by any public administration:

• Strategy: includes tools for maturity assessment, the design of data strategies, and the promotion of data governance, management, and information quality.
• Data: covers tools for developing inventories, glossaries, and master data dictionaries, defining the data lifecycle, and transforming and standardising data in line with common standards.
• Technology: provides privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), as well as technical support for the implementation of catalogue and governance tools.
• Culture and legal: focuses on developing guidelines for organisational change management, analysing sector-specific demand for data, and providing the necessary legal advice.

To maximise their impact, Impulsa DATA’s common services are available for reuse by any public administration. Their standardised and scalable design facilitates adoption and helps extend data governance best practices across the public sector.

Some projects that illustrate the impact

The projects implemented cover a wide range of areas, from official statistics to road safety. Below are some examples that illustrate the initiative’s tangible reach and impact.

• The National Statistics Institute (INE) has expanded its ES_DataLab catalogue with 75 confidential datasets accompanied by extensive metadata. Notable examples include the Household Income Panel, produced jointly with the Spanish Tax Agency, and the Business Multi-location Viewer, developed with the Bank of Spain.
• The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) initially had a limited presence on datos.gob.es, with around 50 datasets. This figure has now risen to 6,300, and is expected to exceed 10,000 published records once the Digital.CSIC repository, which has already been published, and the catalogue of the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain are fully incorporated.
• The National Geographic Institute (IGN) has increased the number of datasets in its catalogue from 12 to 941, including satellite imagery and orthophotos, which are used in territorial analysis and artificial intelligence and big data applications.
• Within the Social Security system, Impulsa DATA has coordinated four managing bodies -the General Treasury, the National Institute, the Social Institute of the Navy, and the Directorate-General for Organisation- to federate 185 datasets under a common model.
• The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food is working on the implementation of a public portal linked to datos.gob.es. Three datasets have been published, including the annual maritime fisheries statistics.
• The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration has strengthened the cataloguing of data from the Spanish Observatory on Racism and Xenophobia, with the aim of facilitating its interoperability and reuse. A total of seven new datasets have been published.
• The Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda has made progress in cleansing and migrating its data to a layered architecture, publishing seven datasets, including the housing stock estimate.
• The Ministry of Culture has developed a data governance pilot based on the Ateneo Survey, a documentary collection dating from the early 20th century containing information on births, marriages, and deaths in Spain.
• The Secretariat-General for Domestic Policy and Electoral Processes has catalogued and published election results broken down by polling station, municipality, and province; a dataset with applications in social behaviour research and regulatory risk analysis.
• The Ministry of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory has catalogued the Sentencias-LEXTER dataset, which contains rulings on constitutional challenges and jurisdictional disputes between the State and Spain’s autonomous communities, and has prepared its data for use in the ALIA artificial intelligence system.
• The State Secretariat for the Civil Service has published the General State Administration’s List of Posts, a dataset detailing the organisational structure and professional profiles across its various public bodies.

Other public bodies have published datasets with direct practical applications. The Directorate-General for Traffic has released a road accident dataset designed to support the analysis of accident black spots and prevention campaigns; the Directorate-General of Police has published the locations of its public service facilities; and the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office has automated the publication of its invention data, which can be used for technology intelligence and monitoring.

Common lessons learned

Feedback from the participating public bodies highlights several recurring themes. The most frequently cited is the importance of institutions moving towards a data-driven organisational culture, supported by effective data governance, management, and quality processes. Participants also emphasise the importance of adopting common standards, such as DCAT-AP-ES and the UNE data governance specifications, as well as automating metadata transformation and publication processes.

The project has also served as a starting point for subsequent initiatives now being undertaken across public administrations, including the establishment of data offices and the development of strategic roadmaps to consolidate data governance over the medium term. The Directorate-General for Data itself has launched the Ágora Data initiative, which aims to build on and further develop the services provided through the Impulsa DATA project.

Impulsa DATA thus concludes its implementation phase with 22 projects and a robust methodological and technological foundation, setting a precedent for the incorporation of new public bodies and the development of sectoral data spaces.