A 'Datathon' to take advantage of open data from the Community of Madrid

Raul Garcia Hemonnet

The Madrid campus, in Vicálvaro, will host the event this Saturday 'DataMad', an event on open data reuse in the Community of Madrid. An event that will have two sessions. One on October 19 and another on November 14.

The main event of the opening day will be the workshop given by Alberto Abella, an expert in reuse (FIWARE Foundation and the Open Data Reuse Observatory of the Rey Juan Carlos University) https://opendatareuseobservatory.org/), who will talk about how to “access, collect, clean and direct data to different types of projects,” says Carmen de Pablos, professor of Business Organization and responsible for the event at the URJC together with Marta Ortiz de Urbina, also a professor in the same area.

The 'Datathon' will be held in a hybrid format and participants will be able to reuse open data from the Community of Madrid to shape their projects. These may be research projects or business ideas.

The second day will feature the participation of experts in open data, both from the Rey Juan Carlos University and from outside the institution. There will be conferences on topics such as the social benefits of this type of data, software and artificial intelligence communities, the URJC Open Data Reuse Observatory or the OfiLibre of this same university, among others.

Participants will also be able to prepare their project or idea and receive advice from the various experts who will participate in the event. On the same day, the presentation of projects and the award ceremony will take place, which consist of mentoring sessions for the three best ideas.

The initiative, organised by the Community of Madrid, the Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences and the Open Data Reuse Observatory, is open to everyone, “it is especially aimed at students so that they can learn about the amount of open data available in the Community of Madrid, but anyone interested in data science can also participate,” says Carmen de Pablos. Students who participate will obtain an Academic Free Configuration credit.

The opening of the event will be led by Jorge Gil Guerra, Head of the Technical Office of Digital Governance of the Community of Madrid, and Carmen de Pablos herself.

Openinnova is the research group that organises this 'Datathon', the result of a contract with the Community of Madrid. The group's priority line of work is research into open data and since 2017 they have been carrying out a report on the use of open data in Spain, work for which they have received several awards.

Thanks to their research, they have been able to see that “Spain is in a good position in terms of open data. Until 20-22, the country was a European success story in public administration. Institutions such as the City Council and the Community of Madrid, the City Council of Barcelona and the Community of the Canary Islands stand out. On the other hand, there are others with room for improvement such as the Regional Government of Extremadura. There are also portals of 'apparent data', which are useless because they are out of date,” explains Carmen de Pablos.