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This strategy must offer information in open and
free formats and with the security and trust needed.
The benefits and responsibilities of OGD
strategy can be seen from three role viewpoints:
citizens, administrations and infomediaries. Citizens
can obtain free and open access to information
collected and generated by the public sector, no
proprietary formats. Citizens can see institutions
more transparent, and therefore some control of
them. For the application developers (infomediaries)
they can develop new products and services,
promote new innovative solutions, and improve their
business. Public administrations can obtain citizens
feedback on the information they published, and
reduce time, costs and efforts to provide information
to the citizens.
Not only benefits but also responsibilities are
achieved for all the participants. Citizens primarily
must collaborate and offer feedback to
administrations. Infomediaries must use new
technologies that improve the way administration
workers and citizens’ access to data. The public
administration must provide transparency, must
provide a broad spectrum of data and must offer a
stable and robust platform for present and future.
Currently, one of the most important aspects in
OGD is the format of public data. There are two
main trends at least. On one side, public
administrations web sites offer great unlinked data
files in proprietary formats or open (Excel or
CSV). The principal problem is that integration with
other data and systems is no easy. On the other hand,
some institutions seek to use data linked through to
linked data-based formats such as RDF (RDF, 2010)
or ontologies (OWL, 2010).
There are several works that provide a set of
steps to develop OGD strategy (O’Reilly, 2010):
1. Develop the policy directive ((www.sfmayor.org/
wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ED-09-06-Open-Data.
pdf)).
2. Create a simple infrastructure, reliable and offer
publicly accessible public data.
3. Try to use open standards that allow
interoperability with other systems.
4. Create web sites that present the catalogue of
data and develop some applications.
5. Share API developed with citizens to gain access
to data without the direct intervention of the
institution.
6. Share work developed with institutions in other
countries, regions and Municipalities.
7. Create a list of applications that can be reused by
employees of the institution.
8. Create an app-store to accommodate all public or
private applications.
9. Encourage citizens and businesses to develop
applications.
10. Create communication channels that allow
citizens to make proposals for new applications from
the data shown publicly.
11. Instruct both employees of the institution and
citizens.
There are different technical specifications related to
the Semantic Web that are used in OGD. The
Resource Description Framework specification,
RDF (www.w3.org/RDF/) is a standard for
exchanging data on the Web. RDF allows the unique
resource description in the web space and establishes
relationships with other objects. You can execute
queries on these data through the SPARQL language
(www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/). We can find
different tools to convert from various formats to
RDF in (esw.w3.org/ConverterToRdf).
3 A CASE STUDY
3.1 Municipality Population Census
San Cristóbal de La Laguna is the third most
populated municipality in Canary Islands, Spain
(http://www.aytolalaguna.com). The Gerencia de
Urbanismo is an autonomous institution that
depends from the town hall and takes care of many
different services related to urbanistic issues. The
Population Census is one of the most important
sources of citizen’s information.
3.2 Requirements
The release of public information of interest for the
citizens is becoming a major concern for the IT
responsible at La Laguna local government. The
purpose of this experience is to prove the feasibility
of OGD implantation in this administration. Later
on, and based on the experience acquired while
developing this example, we would develop a well-
defined protocol to follow in order to extend the
release to other datasets. Besides this, there were
other ideas to take into account:
- Data to work with: use existing real data to face
real issues, and work with a small but representative
dataset.
- Integration with existing systems: keep current
data stores isolated from the publication system for
safety and integraty, allow to publish from
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