Abstract

Publishing open data managed by public administrations is beginning to be considered a strategic action for social and economic development. The legislative and policy support on this issue should be complemented by practical considerations related to certain technical aspects. These aspects have a nimpact on the descriptive metadata datasets of specialized catalogs, the use of open formats and the need to consider open data projects in the cycle of information in organizations. Open data is a source of innovation and new business models that requires efficient mechanisms for locating datasets and tools to access and reuse them.

Abstract

Governments produce, disseminate, preserve and reuse information in order to carry out the public services entrusted to them. They make use of the so-called official publications to disseminate information about public policies. We use the term publications  in the sense that this word has attained in the digital era, that is, any digital resource online, including web pages from departments. The Spanish Administration provides two key elements of information about its publishing activity: the Catalogue of Publications of the General Administration of the State  and the Guide to official publishers. The organizational developments for preserving and reuse the valuable and extensive information of the Spanish Public Sector are still pending, but the current regulatory gaps are in the process of being resolved.

Abstract

This study looks at how and if the Spanish central government is currently meeting the laws of transparency and good governance by providing access to public data. The first part is a description of the most relevant legal standards relating to this topic. Subjects, information on recruitment, formats available to reuse information, and platforms on which these public data are published are identified. This study was performed using March 2016 data from the Public Platform for Hiring which is provided by the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration of Spain. The most important finding may be that the law has been correctly applied by the Spanish government for the reuse of information. On the other hand, accessing information is difficult and nearly half of the subjects do not offer hiring data despite this requirement.