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Open Data BCN

Open Data or Public Sector Information Openness is a movement driven by public administrations with the main objective of maximize available public resources, exposing the information generated or guarded by public bodies, allowing its access and use for the common good and for the benefit of anyone and any entity interested.

This public information, of great potential value, can be relative to any subject and of any type —pictographic documents, statistical data, results of studies or analysis, information on public services, etc.—. Companies, researchers, other public institutions or citizens in general may make use of information resources for any purpose, maximizing the economic and social possibilities offered by this project: promotion of transparency in management, improvement of services to citizens , generation of business activities and social impact, in search of efficiency in governance.

Open Data BCN, a project that was born in 2010, implementing the portal in 2011, has evolved and is now part of the Barcelona Ciutat Digital strategy, fostering a pluralistic digital economy and developing a new model of urban innovation based on the transformation and digital innovation of the public sector and the implication among companies, administrations, the academic world, organizations, communities and people, with a clear public and citizen leadership. The Open Data BCN service, managed from the Department of Statistics and Data Dissemination of the Municipal Data Office, is transversal to several of the pillars of the city's strategy, is based on the main standards and international recommendations, adopting certain characteristics that summarize the principles of this movement:

  • Open data by default. All public information managed by municipal public entities must be publicly exposed by default, allowing their reuse. Only information sensitive and affected by specific laws, such as personal information, documents subject to intellectual property, or data that violates public safety, will be considered as an exception.
  • Quality and quantity of information. Any resource likely to be publicly exposed has a great potential value for its reuse. To the extent possible, these resources will be exposed in a timely manner. Likewise, the data published should be highly detailed and accurate, avoiding unnecessary manipulations such as aggregations or other operations that distort the primary and atomic data. Through the data catalog, metadata associated with the published resources are presented, which classify and describe such datasets with descriptive and technical information about publication dates or update periods, related topics, authors, licenses, etc.
  • Data for the whole world. The published information will follow the principles of technological universality, allowing access to any group to which it may be of interest. As far as possible, free use of the same will be allowed, without establishing physical, administrative or bureaucratic barriers. This universal use requires that the information presented be represented in open and standard formats.
  • Data to improve governance. Government teams that are making efforts to carry out their commitment to good governance will openly disclose clear information about the standards they use, the policies they are developing, their internal processes, and detailed data on the collections of resources exposed to their possible reuse.
  • Promotion of innovation. Apart from the common and democratic value, another of the essential pillars of the project is the economic potential. Individuals and companies will be able to make the most of the products and services provided based on the re-use of this public information. The Open Data BCN service will facilitate the reuse of resources by providing the appropriate information in an automatically processable manner, enabling processing efficiency through the latest and most advanced technologies, if possible, following the most popular standards and protocols in each sectors. In addition to the distribution formats, the information exposed should have permissive use rights and licenses, only with specific clauses that prevent the nature of the data from being distorted, and allow the responsibility of the publishing agent to be diminished, as well as to ensure that the traceability of the source data is maintained, once they have been reused.