General questions about open data
What is the reuse of public sector information?
The reuse of public sector information consists of the use by individuals or legal entities of information generated by public sector bodies, for commercial or non-commercial purposes. The reuse of public information involves activities such as copying, dissemination, modification, adaptation, extraction, rearrangement and combination of information.
What are open data?
Open data is all data that is freely available so that anyone can use, reuse and redistribute it with the only limitation, where appropriate, of the need to attribute it to its source or acknowledge its authorship. Open data must be freely available to everyone without restrictions or copyright, patents or other control mechanisms.
Why reuse public data?
The reuse of public sector information facilitates the development of new products, services and solutions of high socioeconomic value. Likewise, the reuse of public data makes it possible to revert to society the knowledge and direct benefits derived from the activity of public administrations under conditions of transparency. In this way, reuse contributes to improving the reliability and security of the data managed by public administrations as well as contributing to a closer and more efficient design of public services.
Why the web portal datosabiertos.cabildofuer.es?
The objective of the construction of the Open Data web portal of the La Palma Open Island initiative is to build an Open Data Portal in which the access and reuse of the information generated in this project is published and facilitated. This portal publishes and makes existing information available to all using open standard formats, facilitating its access and downloading and allowing its reuse both by individuals and by companies and organizations.
What sections does it offer?
The portal constitutes a single access point and meeting point between the different agents that reuse the information generated in the La Palma Smart Island Initiative. In addition to the catalog of open data sets, the portal offers news, ideas, suggestions and documentation (regulations, technical guides, etc.) related to the open data initiative.
The applications section contains different applications that make use of the data published on the portal. The open data portal also allows everyone to participate in the municipal open data initiative from the participate section.
How to find information?
gobiernoabierto.cabildofuer.es/datosabiertos allows you to find the desired information through different ways. The portal is arranged in thematic sections according to the thematic categories defined in the Interoperability Technical Standard. Likewise, it is possible to access the data sets generated by each Island Administration. Each of the sections of the portal incorporates its own free text search engine, filters and options to order the results obtained by different criteria. Additionally, in the data catalog section, an option to search for the desired information about the data catalog is always available.
How do I access the portal data catalogue?
Access to the complete data catalog of the portal is in the "Data catalog" menu of the main menu bar.
What to do in case of incidents or doubts?
The "Participate" section has been created with the intention of collecting the opinion of all users. If you have any incidence or doubt you can send them through the contact form that you can find in the "Participate" section. These contributions, open to the participation of all users, are essential to improve the service and offer ever higher quality and useful resources.
Data catalog
What resources does the Catalog offer?
Currently, the open data portal gives access through the Public Information Catalog to multiple sets of municipal data. The portal's Data Catalog contains information from various administrations participating in the La Palma Smart Island project and from different categories: tourism, culture, commerce, etc., according to the categorization defined in the Interoperability Technical Standard.
What is a data set?
A data set is, as its name indicates, a series of data linked to each other and grouped within the same information system for its potential reuse. Data sets are also called "datasets".
How to register or modify a data set?
The management and administration of the data catalog and its data sets is carried out by the Administrations participating in the Initiative. To propose a modification of a data set or the creation of a new data set, it is necessary to access the "Participate" section and send the proposal. The proposals received will be analyzed for their possible incorporation into the data catalog in order to improve and expand it.
In what formats are the data published?
The publication of the data is always done in a wide variety of formats if the nature of the information allows it. The objective is to expand the possibilities of data reuse. Not all data sets are published in the same formats. To check the formats in which a specific data set is published, it is necessary to access said data set on the portal.
Open source
CKAN has been used for the development of the portal. This tool is open source and is licensed under the GNU license. Its functionalities include:
- Link or directly upload a multitude of data sets with different formats.
- Preview the content of the data sets directly from the website without having to download it.
- If the data sets we upload have coordinates, visualize them on a map.
- Have a REST API of the different data sets, if we upload them in CSV or XLS formats.
- Automatically generate RDF files that will contain the URIs and pertinent information of each of the data sets.
Metadata
Metadata is data that describes data sets and is needed to inform re-users of the data set's content without having to go into it. It is the same concept of the bibliographic cards of the libraries. The metadata is important because it facilitates the search among all the published data sets, but also by following certain standards and norms, understanding is facilitated at a more global level, for example when they are federated in the national portal. Open data catalog applications (open data portals) already contemplate the inclusion of metadata.
- The DCAT-AP standard allows the description of catalogs of public sector data sets in Europe.
- The Technical Interoperability Standard for the Reuse of Information Resources establishes the Spanish rules for data catalogues. This Standard includes references to the application of DCAT-AP at the Spanish level and also establishes some other parameters to be met.
The open data portal of the Island Council of La Palma is federated with datos.gob.es.