OpenData is the project of public data opening that today has benn presented by the Barcelona city council.

22/11/2010 12:45 h.

• This new municipal service will increase the transparency, it will universalize the access to the datum and will promote the economic fabric and the innovation.
• The portal will enter into operation in February of 2011 with a first set of datum that will be being broadened and will end up being consolidated at the end of 2012.

This morning the Barcelona city council has presented in the Media Tic building its project of Open Data . The fourth deputy mayor, Ramon Garcia-Bragado, has explained that opening the public datum is a first step in the concept of Open Government, a new way to understand the relation between the Administration and the citizenship, the other administrations, the companies and the rest of organizations of the society. An Open Government has to put at public disposal its datum in a suitable electronic format for that they are reused by the citizenship, that is what is known as an Opening of the Public Datum (OpenData).

The project of public datum opening consists in making available, for everybody, the information that the Barcelona city council possesses in digital formats, standardized and open following a clear structure that allows its understanding, facilitating, at the same time, the access to these informative resources in order to foster their reuse.

They are resources of information that the society has the right to use, whether to brief themself or for creating new services, increasing the social value and perhaps, also the commercial value. It is a new service that will universalize the access to this datum, as the web site universalizes the access to documents, without any discrimination and for any use.

With the Open Data project the city council pursues to increase the transparency, on allowing the access to its information, making an continued exercise of being accountable, to universalize the access to the datum allowing a social use and its reuse, to create, for example, services based on public information on the part of the private sector (complementing the services that the city council offers) and, to promote the economic fabric and the innovation, offering datum of quality, raw material of the information society. The Town Council will offer five types different of datum.

Datum of territory, as cartographic datum, of georeference or alphanumeric datum that they will allow applications as varied as services of architecture and design, audiovisual applications, development of software for subjects of mobility, a series of services that have the territory as a starting point - it can be very useful for a company of rehabilitation to know the buildings of more than 100 years -.

Datum of population that will allow to have demographic information of the population of the city, initially for neighborhoods, or even smaller territorial units - always respecting the valid legislation in these matters and therefore the datum of personal character - and that will make possible to group the population for age sets, sex, family structures ..., datum of great potential to segment products and services of varied economic activities, among other possible applications.

Management and procedure indicators that go from the different administrative reports to the management of the equipment and municipal services to the persons; it includes derivative datum from the reports of activities of the city, information of value for whom wants to carry out investments in the city or to develop a business or systems of help to the planning of school activities in the city, introducing to the new citizens in the culture of utilization of this datum.

Datum of the urban environment that includes information of mobility (traffic, public transport, parking lot), security, environment, clenaning, information that in a future can be facilitated to online sensors, information of value that can generate the development of multiple services and applications on transport, mobility, for companies or persons, with or without spirit of profit - For a company that makes applications for the mobile phones (or for the navigators of the cars)  it could be very useful to have the datum updated of the current traffic in the city of Barcelona; for example, to develop systems that plan itineraries depending on private traffic, public transport and disposable parking lot -.

Documental datum brought through the data base of documents of the General Library of the Barcelona city council.

The project will be implanted in two phases, during 2011 the service will start off with the creation of the Open Data portal that will be disposable with the first services the next month of February. Afterwards it will be consolidated and it will broaden. From 2012 the phase of enlargement and consolidation of the services will start with more informative resources and the progressive study of  new resources to be opened.

Open Data is an initiative that does not start from zero since Barcelona is offering important sets of information to the citizenship that can be consulted freely and even downloaded in many cases. A good example that at present is already within the reach of the citizen is the Geoportal service.