Under the banner "Emprendiendo con datos públicos" (Doing business with public data), GMV has participated in the “Aporta” encounter put on by the State Secretariat for Digital Advance (Secretaría de Estado para el Avance Digital) of the Ministry of Economics and Entrepreneurship (Ministerio de Economía y Empresa). Participants at the event swapped notes on the power of public data to drive innovation and entrepreneurship.

Patricia Tejado, Public Digital Services Manager of GMV’s Secure e-Solutions sector, took part in the discussion panel “Public data and business development”, chaired by the State Secretary for Digital Advance, which debated cases of public data being used to improve products or services, bringing businesses into line with new markets and broadening industry’s radius of influence. GMV, notably, has drawn up the open data catalogue and the portal datos.gob.es, among other projects.

Government authorities’ remit of providing the citizens with various services mean they have to generate, keep and handle vast amounts of quality information. Properly reused, this information can then be tapped into for improving their quality of life. In 2009, with this aim in mind, Spain’s government brokered the Aporta initiative to encourage the culture of reusing public-sector information and bringing its social and economic value to much wider notice.

The Aporta initiative has been up and running for eight years now, as part of the overarching Avanza Plan and Digital Agenda for Spain and driven by the Ministry of Regional Policy (Política Territorial), Ministry of Civil Service (Función Pública) and Ministry of Economics and Entrepreneurship (Economía y Empresa), together with the public business entity Red.es. In this time, in the words of Salvador Soriano, Area Coordinator of the State Secretariat for Digital Advance, “a national data catalogue has been drawn up giving access to over 21,500 data sets from various government levels – local, regional and central – and from Spanish universities. This national data catalogue is also federated with the European Data Portal, raising its contents to Europe-wide visibility”.

As GMV’s public-sector manager points out, now that the content has been created with the necessary wherewithal for processing it, the pooling of all this data in a common repository will be favorable to a “forward-looking government with greater capacity for developing data-supported business by a more innovation-intensive industry”.