Bilbao: 7 April 2009

During January this year the Spanish press and Proyecto Aporta reported that the Basque Government was committed to and working on opening up its public sector information. The reports said that the Basque Government was the first Spanish regional administration to make such a commitment. The Government indicated that its commitment was for a genuine opening up of data held by the public sector which is not subject to privacy, safety or property restrictions.

It is now early April and Open Data Euskadi (Apertura de Datos publicos) is now online. The Basque Government is following through with its commitment. It is an initiative framed within policy of Open Government of the Basque Government.

The portal says that it is a Gateway to the public data of the Basque Government with the following objectives.

• Generate Wealth (Getting Data Products by 3rd Parties)
• Build Transparency (re-using the data to analyse and evaluate governance)
• Facilitate Interoperability among Administrations (data services across administrations)

The portal has links to ‘Irekia’ which is an open space for public participation in the design and implementation of open data project Euskadi and innovation in the Basque region.

Open Data Euskadi is an excellent portal with a very attractive design and easy to use layout. Perhaps, more importantly, it has the phase 1 of government data accessible for re-use via a data catalogue and data in electronic (re-usable) file formats. Planning is in place to continue to make data available in a systematic manner according to established priorities.

The data sets are made available under open property licences allowing re-distribution and re-use for commercial purposes (Los contenidos del portal están sujetos a licencia:Creative Commons Reconocimiento 3.0 (salvo donde se indique lo contrario).

In addition to providing access to the data, Open Data Euskadi is a very useful resource because it provides explanations about what is open data, the concepts behind the portal and how to use the data. Information on the portal is presented in various ways including question and answer formats with questions such as: How to find the data? What can you do with the data? What are the licensing terms? There are examples and ideas on how the data can be re-used, too. One such example is a weather forecast widget plus others.

Open Data Euskadi was presented at #Tecnimap2010 by Alberto Ortiz de Zarate and the presentation which includes a good overview on the development and information about the portal can be accessed online.

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