Spain’s Transparency Portal is overcoming the administration’s IT challenges, the project is helping them switch from a data-owning to an open data culture. The design benefited from the Spanish NIF (National Interoperability Framework) and the reuse of open source tools. The new portal now provides access to a wide array of data from various sources. Examples include functions of ministries, budgets, grants, audits and the remuneration of officials. The website also caters to specific requests for other data.
The project team says that the use of the common taxonomies from the NIF and the reuse of open source tools, especially those developed by other administrations, has created a sense of community.
Currently, the portal publishes data from the central government. Spain’s regional and local authorities have a further 12 months to provide their data on the portal.
Policy Context
The Spanish Law on Transparency, Act 19/2013, of 9 December, on Transparency, Access to Public Information, and Good Governance, is the legal framework on citizen’s rights concerning data and information access and use. This law has a triple purpose:
- to increase and strengthen government transparency,
- to recognise and guarantee citizens’ right of access to information,
- to establish good governance obligations to be met by public officials and the legal consequences of non-compliance.
The Law establishes obligations of active publication of information without waiting for specific requests by citizens (active advertising). It also establishes the right of access to public information without having to justify the request.
The Act 19/2013, of 9 December, on Transparency, Access to Public Information, and Good Governance provides what information public authorities must publish for the information of citizens, how citizens can ask information to the authorities and the rules of good governance to be met by public officials.
The right of access to public information, in the terms provided in the Constitution Article 105.b), means public information or documents, whatever their medium or format, in the possession of the administration and who have manufactured or acquired in the exercise of its function. The right of access to information is subject to certain limits that aim to protect other legal interests.
Description of target users and groups
Citizens and public administrations.
Description of the way to implement the initiative
To facilitate compliance to the legislation requesting active publishing and to gather this large amount of information and facilitate access, the Law relies on information technology and provides for the establishment of a Transparency Portal through which citizens can access all information.
The Portal contains information from autonomous communities, local authorities, state corporations, foundations and constitutional bodies. It needs to be interoperable to facilitate the sharing of information by administrations.
The Portal provides near 500,000 data sets, and covers three areas of information according to Act 19/2013:
- Organizational information such as functions, applicable regulations, annual plans and programs, objectives, compliance and results;
- Information with legal relevance such as guidelines, agreements, replies to queries involving an interpretation of the law or legal effects, draft laws or decrees, reviews and reports related to the drafting and reviewing of legal texts, documents to be submitted for public information;
- Economic information such as contracts, management commissions, remunerations of senior staff, government subsidies and support, budgets, annual accounts, audit reports, statistical information on the degree of compliance of public services, state-owned property.
Technology solution
Provision of information on the portal
The ways of providing information on the portal differ according to the origin of the information and the exchange model. They are classified into the following types:
- Centralized: this is the case when information comes from a single source of information (for example, the Central Information of Inventoried Assets -CIBI- provides data on all real estate of the General State Administration).
- Distributed: This is the case when information on the same subject comes from multiple sources, using a common data model. In this case, its introduction on the portal is done manually.
- Mixed: In this case, there will be information coming from centralized sources as well as similar information gathered in a distributed way. An example is the information about legislation. When in force, it is provided by the Official Gazette (BOE). When in development, it comes either from an application of the Government Secretariat, or from each department (documents open to public consultation).
- Linked: The information is not captured in the Transparency Portal, but the Portal refers to external specialized information sources, this is the case for budget data for example.
Technical solution
The technical solution is modular and based on several components.
GESAT solution (Aplicación para la Gestión de las Solicitudes de Acceso) is a tool processing administrative files through web services. It manages notifications, documents etc and allows the electronic signature of documents in the application itself. It includes the processing of the lifecycle of a record, a form editor that provides flexibility in the creation of forms, configurable statistical reports and procedures as well as the creation of a history lifecycle of a file. The framework used is based on MVC (model view controller) Zend, the database is MySQL and managed by the ORM Doctrine.
The publisher / indexer module is developed in Java on Spring-boot. This is an application launcher on Spring facilitating auto configuration. Spring provides dependency injection, MVC, RESTful Web service, foundational support for JDBC, JPA, JMS. Spring-data provides complete integration to develop services with Elasticsearch, Redis, etc. REDIS is an open-source project on key-value cache memory. It can support strings, hashes, lists, sets ... This system keeps in memory cache searches (for example) for a configurable time, offering a significant gain in service performance. ElasticSearch is the search engine, available under the open-source Apache license. Elasticsearch provides a scalable clustering structure between nodes. It maintains the distributed information and is able to search "full-text". Elasticsearch uses Lucene whose properties include spell checking, "hit highlighting" and advanced analysis capabilities / tokenization.
Symfony 2 is used as the PHP framework for the web applications.
The portal is integrated within the authentication portals of the Spanish Directorate for Information Technologies and Communications.
Structuring of information
Some examples of available functionalities enabling the structuring of information in the portal include:
- automatic generation of the following 5 models: Structure and functions of the department, Curriculum Vita, regulations, departmental plans and smaller contracts.
- auto complete for the data catalog: catalog name, catalog description: Identifier or URI, publisher, dates of creation and updating, home, conditions of use, languages, RISP categories (Reutilización de Información del Sector Público – Public Sector Information Reuse);
- auto complete for datasets: identifier, taxonomies, creation and modification dates, language, publisher, conditions of use, geographic coverage, temporal coverage, title;
- auto complete DIR3 (common directory of public administration organization) units, display of DIR3 tree dependent units, auto complete of RISP categories, help section for the consultation of units in DIR3 and RISP categories;
- download of the dataset in XML format.
Technology choice: Standards-based technology, Mainly (or only) open standards, Accessibility-compliant (minimum WAI AA), Open source software
Main results, benefits and impacts
All data is exchanged in reusable formats (XML, CSV), as requested in the “Interoperability Agreement for the reuse of information resources - Interoperability Standard – National Interoperability Framework (NIF) Spain”.
The information provided by each department generates a catalogue that could be processed by the Open Data Portal of Spain.
Information provided from a centralised source which is indexed in the Transparency Portal uses open standards (atom feeds, xml and csv). This means that the possibilities of reusing this information are huge.
Additionally, all the information indexed in the Transparency Portal includes indicators allowing its indexing based on two categories or taxonomies. These are:
- the common directory of units of the Spanish administration (DIR3)
- the thematic categories of the National Interoperability Framework.
Return on investment
Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available
Lessons learnt
The main lesson learned is the importance of the co-operation of the different departments. Switching from a data-owning to an open data philosophy is a very big change in culture and has been the main challenge to manage.
Additionally, the use of open source technologies and reuse of different existing applications made the duration of the project shorter and lowered the costs. The solutions reused came not only from the open source market but also from Spain’s public administration departments.
The use of common catalogues (common directory, thematic areas) has provided a sense of community in the administration. Each new application or service is now managed from the point of view of being able to link the data between departments and applications.
The National Interoperability Framework has been crucial at this point. This normative framework is as a keystone of high value for many projects.
Scope: Local (city or municipality), National, Regional (sub-national)