Share-PSI 2.0 Best Practice

Source: Best Practices/A Federation Tool For Opendata Portals

Outline of the best practice

The Spanish National Catalogue datos.gob.es has developed A federation tool for open data portals that enables automatic publication of the metadata corresponding to the data sets published on the websites of each public entity. A global index of reusable public information is thus created and can be accessed by companies or any user to locate reusable data in datos.gob.es without the need to know and find the website of the public entity holding the data in which re-users are interested in.

Management summary

Challenge

Public entities are creating their own open data spaces in the web. These different spaces are unconnected. To avoid that reuse agents have to look for the data all over the web, we needed a single point where all the national public sector information can be permanently and automatically referenced

Solution

The catalogue federation tool enables aggregation and automatic publication of the metadata corresponding to the data sets published on websites of each public entity and also at the National Catalogue datos.gob.es in a consistent way. A global index of reusable public information is thus created and can be accessed. This solution enables the existence of a global reuse scenario that provides greater visibility for the public data made available by the three levels of government (central, regional, local and universities), as well as a general overview of how public sector information is being reused in Spain.

Best Practice identification

Why is this a Best Practice? What’s the impact of the Best Practice

• ability to interconnect open data initiatives at a single access point
• enrichment of datos.gob.es through the large-scale upload of meta-information
• maximum consistency between the information being made available by the public entities in their own catalogues and the information referenced at datos.gob.es.
• reduced workload for public employees, no need to upload information twice
• existence of a global scenario that fosters the extraction of general conclusions and a general overview of the PSI situation in Spain
• standardisation and data integrity, automated publication and constant updating of published information, visibility of the data sets
• helping to accomplish PSI Directive to each entity
• fostering development of new digital products and services
• large-scale upload and regular updating of the information published on datos.gob.es

Links to the PSI Directive

Policies and Legislation

Why is there a need for this Best Practice?

• get the most out of scarce public resources
• facilitate reuse as datasets are displayed in a clear and structured fashion on a user-friendly interface for reuse
• get guidelines to use standard metadata structure ensuring consistent growth of the central national Open Data Catalogue.
• facilitate public employees avoiding to publish information in two different places

What do you need for this Best Practice?

• legal and technical framework ensuring datasets federation at the national data portal in a standard manner
• coordination structure between the different administrative levels (State, Regional, Local)
• a data portal as a single point
• agreed Metadata scheme
• complementary webservices and widgets that enable meta-information to be obtained and processed according to various invocation parameters and various response formats

Applicability by other Member States

The approach is applicable to any Member State. The following components of this best practice could be easily re-used:

• technical standards to establish common conditions for: the selection, identification, description, conditions of use and making available of data sets are closely linked to the DCAT Application profile for data portals in Europe.
• The federation tool - integrated as an extra module on the datos.gob.es portal ensures effective federation with datos.gob.es of the open data catalogues of the public entities and, in a future step, with the Pan-European Open Data portal (http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data), which seeks to facilitate the location and reuse of data from national, regional and local administration services throughout Europe.

Contact info

soporte@datos.gob.es ; http://administracionelectronica.gob.es/general/verContacto.htm

Related Best Practices

• Best Practices/Support Federation of Open Data Portals