What are?

Open Data is either philosophy and practice which aims that given information be freely available for anybody, without copyright, patent or any other restriction. Data must be published in a raw way (i.e. unprocessed), properly structured and in “well known” formats which aid re-use.

Public Sector generates a great variety of information of interest for the citizen and the companies, as for instance, social, economic, geographic, statistic, weather, touristic, business and education information. This information has a set of attributes, which make it especially appealing for the Digital Content niche, as it is complete, reliable and with good quality.

Making Public Sector data available entitles anybody, either person or organisation, to build, based on it, any new idea or business which may end up providing new data, knowledge, enhance processes and/or provide added value to existing or new potential services.

Therefore, Open Data has a remarkable economic potential as well as it is key to boost transparency, citizenship participation and collaboration, required for a more open government.

Its purpose

  • Transparency.Data origin and reliability make it an awesome way to portrait the public management carried out, accounting and external audit, all aimed to assure transparency in public service management and build trust in the citizenship.
  • Public Information Re-use.Any organisation generates heaps of useful data for other departments or organisations. Open Data is established as a tool to publish the information made available by the Administration to the citizenship so they can reuse it.
  • Boosting the economy and the efficiency.Being more efficient based on Open Data includes avoiding duplicate costs, efficiencies as the result of having better visibility on processes, and the chance to set actions to enhance them. Creating new services, which allow setting new ways of collaboration, either internal or external.
  • Source of innovation.New sources of data available lead to innovation allowing business strengthen, create new services, face problems from a different angle, collaborating before existing challenges.

Who is Open Data intended for?

  • For developers:Boosting the public information re-use, allowing the creation of new services, favouring the innovation, decreasing the required investments to develop applications and generally providing a reliable information on top of which be able to develop research and business.
  • For Citizenship: Highlighting the public management results in a transparent, consistent and reliable way.
  • For the Public Administration: Get rid of barriers to information re-user, removing redundancies, boosting management efficiency and hinder undesirable situations such as corruption or public funds embezzlement.

Main formats published

SHP – Spatial data format, considered the standard de-facto for geographic information sharing between Geographic information system (GIS). It is a vector format of digital storage, developed by ESRI, where is stored the location of geographical elements and attributes associated with them.

GML – It is a sublanguage of XML described as a grammar in XML Schema for the modelling, transport and storage of geographic information. Its importance lies in that computer level is constituted as a lingua franca for the management and transfer of information between the various software that make use of this type of data, such as geographic information systems.

WFS – Web Feature Service o WFS of the Consortium Open Geospatial Consortium or OGC It is a standard service, which offers a communication interface that allows you to interact with maps served by standard WMS, for example, edit the image that offers service WMS or scan the image according to geographical criteria. The language is used to perform these operations GML that derives from the XML, which is the standard through which transmitted orders WFS.

WMS – It is a service defined by the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) that produces maps of spatially, referenced dynamically from geographic information data. It is an international standard that defines a map as a representation of geographic information in the form of a digital image file.

KML – the acronym Keyhole Markup Language, is a markup language based on XML to represent geographic data in three dimensions. It was developed to be managed with Keyhole LT, forerunner of Google Earth. Your grammar contains many similarities with the GML.

KMZ – It is a compressed KML file to save space and gain in speed of transmission.

CSV – Plain text in simple format document type to represent tabular data in columns separated by semicolon, and rows separated by line breaks.

JSON – an acronym for JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight format for data exchange. JSON It is a subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript that does not require the use of XML.

JSON-LD – JSON-LD, or JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data, It is a linked data transport method (Linked Data) using JSON.

RDF XML/TURTLE /N3 – RDF or Resource Description Framework It is not a specific format but an infrastructure for the description of the resources from the web using expressions of the form predicate – object. The subject is the resource that is described, the predicate is the property on which you want to set the resource and the object is the value of the property that the relationship is established. The combination of RDF with other tools allows you to add meaning to the pages and is one of the essential Semantic Web technologies. There are several formats of representation: XML, for automatic processing; N3, for representation in plain text in a more readable way to human; Turtle, as a simplification of the previous.