The AOC's open data platform is consolidated with 1.181 user local entities, 38 common data sets and 200 resources
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From the AOC, in conjunction with the Network of Transparent Governments, we strongly promote the opening of data from the local world as a value to promote transparency and reuse, to innovate in the public, social and 'company.
For this reason, since January 2015, all local bodies in Catalonia havea free open data platform, which currently includes 38 data sets generated without having to do any work. These sets have been generated and updated periodically from supra-municipal data sources (Barcelona Provincial Council, Generalitat de Catalunya, General State Administration and others) and allow you to consult, download and analyze the main areas of municipal management: budget, staff, aid, debt, payment to suppliers, etc.
To commemorate March 6 as International Open Data Day, we want to make a collection of interesting experiences that already has more than twenty Catalan councils publishing their own data, and more than 200 published resources.
Open data portal: experiences in the territory
Many of the councils that have been encouraged to promote the service are large. In this group of town halls we find very good experiences like those of Holy Coloma of Gramenet, Granollers, Rubí o El Prat de Llobregat with portals that present a large volume of published data.
Main page of the open data portal offered by the AOC
In these town halls we can find information on the empty premises of the city (Granollers), managements of the office of citizen attention by subject and day (Santa Coloma de Gramenet), or companies of the municipality or the census of vehicles (El Prat de Llobregat).
However, among the large city councils and as a paradigmatic example of the use of the open data portal that we offer from the AOC, it is necessary to highlight the work that is being done from the City Council of Tarragona.
In Tarragona they currently have an open data portal with 68 different data sets (encompassing more than 100 available resources), but the most remarkable thing is that beyond the typical and standard value table format, they are moving forward to show the data with resources on different formats including tables, maps, graphs or associated reports.
To do this, they use different technologies such as Instamaps, PowerBI, Tableau or Flourish, with the aim of accompanying the data with more understandable resources, both for the public and for potential re-users.
Examples of resources in different data sets in the Tarragona open data portal
If we go into medium-sized municipalities we find good examples of data publication in Sitges, providing a lot of value from mobile phone data, and Sant Quirze del Vallès, where they publish different data sets on the standard models we propose from the AOC, currently 18, although we will soon offer new ones to reach 25. You can access the models of standardized data sets.
In this group of medium-sized town halls we especially highlight the experiences of Castellar del vallès i Sant Just Desvern, because we encourage open data to automate the information of the transparency portal itself.
Castellar del Vallès open data portal data set, which automatically feeds an item from the transparency portal
In terms of smaller municipalities in the range of 10.000 inhabitants stands out the city of Matadepera, which has 6 own published data sets, and is doing a very interesting job publishing the inventory of movable or immovable property, or the licenses of works requested with historical data from 2017.
Table and map with the building permits requested in Matadepera
And the smaller town halls?
In Catalonia, almost 85% of town councils have less than 5.000 inhabitants, of which more than 600 town councils have less than 2.000 inhabitants. It is clear that these councils are having the most difficulty in promoting open data projects, although it is worth mentioning that interesting experiences are already beginning to emerge.
It is necessary to emphasize the experiences of city councils like The Dams (La Garrotxa) or Ascó (Ribera d'Ebre), both pioneers in the promotion of open data in municipalities with less than 2.000 inhabitants.
In Les Preses they publish data sets as interesting as municipal facilities, municipal entities or defibrillators in the territory. Ascó publishes the remuneration of elected officials or entities in the municipality.
As a strategic project to highlight the data open in small town halls, from the AOC we follow closely the experiences of the town halls of Garcia (525 inhabitants) and Miravet (706 inhabitants) which, with the collaboration of the County Council of la Ribera d'Ebre, are working to identify and extract data from their back-office, publish them in open data and facilitate automatic publication on the transparency portal. This is a very interesting project that with the help of the Regional Council of the Ribera d'Ebre can serve as a model to promote open data in other municipalities. We will follow it and share the details with you.
conclusions
We can see that there are very interesting experiences in data publishing, improvements in the dissemination of information to the public or the promotion of the automation of active transparency advertising. These are very interesting experiences that we will follow and share.
If you are interested in learning about other experiences and advancing in open data, we leave you with the reference proposed itineraries to move forward.
From the AOC we would like to thank the effort and enthusiasm of all the participants in the Open Data working group, with whom we have been collaborating continuously in recent years. The group is made up of technical staff from the town councils of Tarragona, El Prat de Llobregat, Rubí, Sant Cugat del Vallès, Castellar del Vallès, Sant Just Desvern and Sant Quirze del Vallès.
In the working group we work basically to model new standard sets but also to make different improvements to the service. As an example, we are currently working on an open data dashboard that will make it easier to know very quickly and easily the use of data (queries, downloads…) of published sets. In the coming weeks we will validate and publish it in the open.
