open data – Open

Speech about open data and its relations with digital twins and AI

maestro — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 06:44:27 +0000

Find here my speech about

The slides

Slides from speech about open data reuse in private sector

maestro — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 16:46:33 +0000

Find here the slides of the presentation (in Spanish) about open data for the private sector.

Thanks to the COTEC Foundation, the ‘Confederación de Empresarios de Andalucía’ for organizing the event and.

PPT_REUTILIZACIÓN_DE_DATOS_ABIERTOS

The meeting was held on Sevill past January 28th.

Explanations about open data’s myths, what are the elements to be considered for actual and professional reusability of data, and some advance results about the III report on the situation of open data in Spain were presented. It ended with an explanation about the future of open data and the data sharing on data spaces.

Reports on the status of open data in Spain (Spanish)

maestro — Sun, 11 Apr 2021 23:11:01 +0000

These two reports analyze the status of open data in Spain by reviewing all the open data portals, surveying their responsible managers, sampling the applications and services created, and sampling the datasets published.

We are currently on the way to launching 2021 edition.

Enjoy the report for 2017 thanks to PIA program of COTEC.
Enjoy the 2019 report thanks to desidedatum.

Helping Spanish linked open data portals to meet EU regulations

maestro — Sat, 12 Mar 2016 18:19:16 +0000

Just a tiny spillover of my job to share with you.

If you are a linked open data portal administrator in Spain is quite likely that you have chosen the Spanish regulation to categorize all the datasets in your catalogue. The coming EU regulation, DCAT-AP use a slightly different approach, and they have qualified around 250.000 datasets according to this new regulation in the pan-eu open data portal. Don’t they?. Maybe the table below will help you to simplify while reassigning your informations to the new categorization coming in.

Topics in DCAT-AP v1.1	Topics in Spanish regulation NTI reutilización
Science and technology	ciencia-tecnologia
Agriculture, fisheries, forestry and food	medio-rural-pesca
Economy and finance	economia comercio hacienda
Education, culture and sport	educacion cultura-ocio deporte
Energy	energia
Environment	medio-ambiente
Government and public sector	sector-publico
Health	salud
International issues
Justice, legal system and public safety	Legislacion-justicia seguridad
Regions and cities	Urbanismo e infraestructuras
Population and society	demografia sociedad-bienestar empleo vivienda
Transport	transporte
	Industria
	turismo

Of course it is an absolutely unofficial categorization so it is open for improvement. Use it ‘As is’ no guarantee.

Good luck!

My speech at SEDIC. Video

maestro — Thu, 19 Nov 2015 16:25:20 +0000

SEDIC are the annual meeting for information management.
This year there was a session dedicated to big data, here you can find my speech (in Spanish).

don’t care about the initial image (it’s me when you press start the video)

Challenges in open data policies at universidad de Alicante.

maestro — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 11:11:16 +0000

Here you can see the video of my speech about challenges in policies on open data (in Spanish)

And the presentation

Desafios en las politicas de datos abiertos. Challenges in the open data policy from Alberto Abella

Presentación en infoday FINODEX malaga

maestro — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 11:33:17 +0000

24-6-2015. Málaga.Hablando sobre que es open data, los problemas actuales, y como superarlos. Y una parte sobre el futuro del open data.

INDICE
Presentación
La fauna de los datos
El primer desafío: el círculo abierto
El sector de los datos (infomediario) ya no es lo que era
Reutilizando datos
Nuevos modelos de negocio
Impactos más allá del sector infomediario
El problema de la interconexión
De datos a servicios
que hacer

An experiment with data from the open government partnership: Ranking countries

maestro — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 00:58:38 +0000

The OGP is a global organization to promote Open government on more than 60 countries.

Every member can submit a annual plan to explain which will be their action for the next year. This plan is independently reviewed and their reviews are published.

Even more, some main data about accomplishment are made public in this databases (Commitments analyzed and Accomplishments of the plan).

Let’s make a tiny experiment with these data.

First of all we have to know that the submitted plan could incorporate new actions or existing ones. Secondly these actions could be completed or not accordingly to the plan. Thirdly and very important, these action could have a moderate, minor or a transformative effect on the countries’ governance. Last but not least, these action could be relevant (or no) for an open government plan.

In all these dimensions of analysis there are some cases in which it is not clear the qualification (or data are not available). These cases should be also considered in this experiment with data.Also severla countries did not submit their reviews on time so their data are not available (USA, UK, S. Africa, Philippines, Mexico, Indonesia and Brazil)

Now let’s create a draft metric about the performance of the different countries.

my first attempt is

[math]
Plan Ambition = log (\sum 100*(Action_i(new))* 100*Action_i(impact)* 100*Action_i(specificity))
[/math]
Why the log? In order to promote more detailed action plans (more actions) but without penalize those more concise. Multiplied if the action has real impact and if the action really affects governance. With these metric we could rank countries according to these graph.

Similarly the progress will be just a minor correction on above formula, and normalized by the # of actions.
[math]
Plan Ambition = log ((\sum 100*(Action_i(new))* 100*Action_i(impact)* 100*Action_i(specificity)*Action_i(progress))/\sum _i)
[/math]

And the the ranking would look like this.

Of course it is just a mere experiment. Possibly unfair with some countries because of the structure of their plan, the assigned weights or because of past experience makes them harder to be ambitious in their plan formulation.
Are we mature enoguh to create such official ranking? I strongly believe it.

Find here the raw data calculation if you want to make your own experiment.

Annex.

Find here the table which assign weights for every dimension of the actions in the plan fo every country.

New or not	how many	weights
	0	0
New	317	1
Pre-existing	445	0.5
Unclear	21	0.5
Grand Total	783

Completion	how many	weights
a. Not started	116	0
b. Limited	319	0.25
c. Substantial	204	0.5
d. Complete	271	1
NA	8	0
Unclear	23	0
Withdrawn	17	0
Grand Total	958

Impact	how many	weights
	0	0
Minor	247	0.25
Moderate	300	0.5
None	49	0
Transformative	183	1
Unclear	4	0.125
Grand Total	783

Specificity	how many	weights
a. low	242	0.25
b. medium	292	0.5
c. high	394	1
None	30	0
Grand Total	958

Warning of three deadly mistakes of the Open Spanish community

maestro — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:32:00 +0000

In this article I am going to revisit several mistakes the Spanish Open community made last decade in order to avoid that similar faults would lead the Open data / open government community to lose the opportunity which we are facing today. Maybe some other countries would share some of these mistakes.

Background

Spain had been a pioneer in the development of an open source and software libre community. Since the early 2000 numerous and relevant people had surged claiming on the adoption of open technologies, i.e. FLOSS, open standards, etc.

However today, 10 years after, Spain has no remarkable differences in the implementation of open technologies, neither in the public administrations nor between current people. As an exception to this rule could be mentioned the supportive legislation it has been passed but this support has not a correspondence with the real implementations.

Why? Due, in my opinion, to three deadly mistakes.

Error 1: Let politicians to lead the community,

When in 2002 Extremadura government announced its Linex (Linux distribution for Extremadura) most of the advocates clapped for the courage of the Extremadura’s rulers to face the monopoly of Microsoft.

Unfortunately, politicians think not in their citizens’ profit but in their own profit in terms of voting results. Therefore their focus was not to create a global and sustainable ecosystem but to have a political tool to show their independence and the bleeding edge technology they were adopting, independently of its long term sustainability.
They remark the regional adaptation over the possibility to have a huge users’ base all over the world.
Most of the advocates of the open community, and I was one of them, considered the political use of open technologies, a collateral and affordable damage, as long as support and funds were derived to feed the open ecosystem. Even when in a crazy move, politicians presented open technologies as politically biased (mostly left-wing) most of us agree with the inconsistency.

Time went by and other Spanish regions (Andalucia, Castilla La Mancha, Madrid, Valencia, Cataluña, Melilla city) independently of their political trend adopted identical reasoning. What they, involuntary, created was a mess of linux distributions feeded with public funds but unable to create a critical mass of users to sustain an independent market.
Final shot was the creation of a public national entity to support the open technologies approach for the central and regional administrations. What it thought as a good idea, it was launched with a low profile, so that it resulted useless to prescribe open technologies for the rest of administrations or to create those common standardisation between administrations.

Currently when public impulse has been reduced due to crisis, the communities around these distributions simply have died of starvation. Or just when elections changed the rulers, newcomers simply declare obsolete the approach and let the initiatives die without any support.

Error 2: Divide yourself and you will be defeated

Incredibly, since the beginning of the floss movement in Spain, divergences and other kind of divisions were present and early supporters from public administrations were criticised when their first steps were not as open as expected.

Apart from the incomprehensive regional differences, other differences like Software libre against open source, debian vs other linux distributions community approach against company use of open technologies, etc were widely profited for the closed and privative technologies companies with lots of FUD which could be summarised in a sentence “Open technologies are neither reliable nor supported”.

Division was so present that even counting with more than 130 FLOSS users’ groups by the first half of the decade it resulted impossible (twice was tried) to federate them in a significant way in order to constitute an open technologies lobby.

Such waste of resourses reinventing the wheel, in the form of new local linux distributions, terribly local events, or the forks of existing applications etc was unsustainable and today community is mostly composed by small companies.

Error 3: Let minimize your impact on society and you will be margined

Whenever you want to influence in your society you have to explain to the Joe bloggs why it matters to them. A saying states that “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”. Those (black console’ lovers) who in the early days were promoting open technologies create the false image than open technologies were only for geeks and freaks.

Nowadays, when black console is history for normal users of open technologies, these image has not been removed from most of potential users.

If you add to this, a good bunch of technical terms, talking about problems which only affect programmers, and looking like an outsider, your message will be definitely put apart from the masses, independently of the incredibly performance or the indisputable reasoning it could provide.

Emerging Open data community has to avoid this three icebergs for a secure navigation
Those 3 mistakes could shed light on the path that the open data community has to travel. find here suggestions on how to avoid them.

First iceberg, politicians: Open data is the modern management

Public Open data is the main column of the open government approach. Open data advocates and activists has to avoid to be used by any political party. Public open data, and its implicit transparency is “The modern way of managing the ‘Res publica’” with lots of positive impacts (economical, transparency, accountability, agility, etc).

So that, implementation into public administrations should be considered like the introduction of computers some decades ago, basic technologies for the management and methodology for the public processes but not a political issue to dispute.

Second iceberg dispersion: Active Co-operation

Normalisation (and therefore the possibility to co-operate) is a key factor in order to create critical masses of users, professional, companies, citizens or whatever.

Although linked data approach would accomplish this task, its high cost of adoption (time, processes and cost) could restrict it from being the expected solution to the normalisation.

Standardisation for common data (opendata) it is an urgent issue. If you were an activist of the open community check Internet before launching anything, you will go further if you were not alone.

Third iceberg opendata as a geek topic: Significant impact in real economy and society

Economic impact of the opendata have to take into account not only in terms of the direct companies and services created but also their impact on fiscal fraud and informal economy. Informal economy accounts for a 23% (240.000 M€) of GDP in Spain (same as Tourism and automotive industry together in Spain).

Massive Open data is not a technical issue, is a change in the way a society is ruled, and therefore it has a reflect in real economy in terms of company creation, reduction of wasted resources and innovative public and private services which increase national competitiveness.

So the message around “Open data is not, a technical issue, but a main trend in the our current societies’ governance“.

Mirando con perspectiva el open government es inevitable

maestro — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Que estamos en un mundo limitado no hay más que verlo a través de la imagen que acompaña a este artículo. Cuanto más se desarrolla la civilización en las distintas partes de la tierra, tenemos que solucionar problemas que anteriormente no existían o eran secundarios.

Una mirada con perspectiva histórica puede ayudar.

La edad media

En la edad media, reinaban los gobiernos emanados de un impulso ‘divino’ y los ciudadanos (entonces súbditos) en aquella época tenían como principal lucha la supervivencia a las enfermedades, las hambrunas y las guerras. Y las noticias les llegaban por palomas o por caballos.
Un gobierno más participativo, era en la edad media prácticamente imposible y por tanto no proporcionaba ventaja alguna.

La Revolución industrial y el comienzo del siglo XX

En esta época, con los avances médicos y la popularización de la imprenta, los ciudadanos superaron algunos de los problemas de épocas anteriores y comenzaron a preocuparse por tener un empleo digno que les permitiera sobrevivir en su sociedad. Entonces, gracias a los primeros medios de comunicación, y la extensión de la alfabetización, conocían como sus gobernantes gestionaban su realidad, y este hecho forzó a que los gobiernos fueran progresivamente más participativos.

Fue en esta época cuando empezaron las primeras globalizaciones donde los ciudadanos se dieron cuenta, que lo que se hiciera en la gobernanza de los mercados de otros países tenía una repercusión directa en su forma de vida.¿Nos suena?

La segunda guerra mundial

La II gran guerra mundial conllevó la victoria de sistemas de gobierno donde cada vez más la transparencia y la participación (a veces sólo de forma nominal como en el bloque soviético) eran puntales de su existencia. El gran cambio acaecido vino de la mano de los medios de comunicación de masas (aunque unidireccionales) como la radio y la televisión y que los gobernantes intentaban (e intentan) controlar de forma afin a sus intereses. Cada vez es más difícil gobernar de espaldas a los ciudadanos, sin explicar las medidas y sin darles la oportunidad de la participación.

El anacronismo actual

Como en las anteriores épocas históricas tenemos que abordar ciertos problemas de conflictos regionales, producción de alimentos, sanidad, educación, etc, pero hoy en día tenemos más del 50% de la población conectada entre sí, bidireccionalmente, a velocidades inimaginales en épocas anteriores gracias a Internet y la telefonía móvil.

Sin embargo los mecanismos de gobernanza pública y privada podemos considerar que son prácticamente los mismos que los que emergieron en los países ‘civilizados’ tras las segunda guerra mundial.

Las crisis que vivimos nos ha demostrado

1) Vivimos en un mundo conectado donde lo que hagan otros tiene un impacto bastante directo sobre nuestra realidad

2) La falta de transparencia y precisión de información (económica y financiera, entre otras) tanto pública como privada ha sido el agravante de una enorme crisis mundial.

3) Los ciudadanos se organizan de forma mucho más diligente y efectiva que los mecanismos actuales de participación vía partidos políticos.

Nuestro insostenible sistema nos lleva al open government

Estos 3 hechos nos llevan encaminan a una situación insostenible, de los mecanismos de gobierno en los siguientes aspectos, por lo menos:

1) No proporciona ninguna ventaja que la gobernanza pública sólo tenga en cuenta la opinión explícita de los ciudadanos cada 4 años. (En el ámbito privado empresarial es anual para los accionistas)

2) No proporciona ventajas, salvo muy contadas excepciones, que la gestión pública no sea precisamente eso, pública y conocida de los ciudadanos, a diferencia de hoy, donde hay que ‘luchar’ por saber lo que hacen con nuestros bien amados impuestos.

3) Es un desperdicio de recursos intelectuales que las leyes se generen en los ‘oscuros’ entornos de los partidos, o de lobbies, negociando únicamente entre partidos u otros actores con intereses a veces demasiado ‘particulares’.

4) Ya estamos pagando la falta de un gobierno global, para los desafíos globales. Por ejemplo, en la UE estamos sufriendo la falta de un gobierno económico común. Y sin este gobierno mundial hay problemas como el medio ambiente, el hambre, los paraísos fiscales, el narcotráfico, las posibles epidemias globales, el terrorismo global, etc que tendrán difícil solución.

5) La falta de justificación pública de los resultados a obtener con la legislación adoptada, o con las distintas medidas del los gobiernos a todos los niveles repercute en la baja calidad de las mismas.

Estamos en una situación a la de dar un préstamo a un emprendedor que no le explica que es lo que va a vender, por que va vender en un mercado frente a sus competidores y cuales serán sus ingresos. Eso, es hoy la receta de la práctica totalidad de los gobiernos (sobre todo públicos, pero también privados) que ocultan tanto las explicaciones de lo que pretenden lograr con sus distintas medidas como los datos sobre los que han apoyado sus decisiones.

Por estos, y seguro que por muchos otros motivos, se me antoja inevitable que en un plazo corto, (una o dos crisis más) nuestra forma de gobierno evolucione en el sentido de mayor transparencia y participación, y no por la presión ciudadana actual, que también, sino por que simplemente

El aumento de la participación y la transparencia da mejor resultado

y los países que antes lo adoptan antes obtienen sus ventajas, o al menos eso parece indicar la trayectoria que marca la historia. ¿Qué sistema adoptaremos? Es una incógnita, de momento deberíamos ir mirando alguno de los disponibles.