Seville’s local government has set up the municipal Open Data portal in line with many other Spanish towns, in accordance with the access right to the municipal information, as set out in The Transparency Act. The portal offers information about the municipal activity and it gathers together information from the city in 75 groups, all associated with areas that will be under constant update and expansion.

In its catalogue, the initial portal includes information regarding the business sector, cultural agendas, demographics and population, the environment, contracts with the public sector, municipal budgets, public parking and buses, the state of traffic, places of touristic interest and street guides, among others, in harmony with the European guidelines on information of public interest.

The Sevillian government expect for the new access tool to work, as well as to improve the transparency of the town´s activity, to enrich the digital economy and create new job posts in the city. In this sense, the objective is that entrepreneurs and developers can make use of the available information to start business projects and create applications, as has happened in other towns.

Furthermore, the new portal, hosted on the town council´s website joins those of Transparency and Civil Participation, and acts as another element of the initiative that includes the development of Seville as a Smart City.

According to the representative of Economics, Business and Institutional Relations, Carmen Castreño, the local government finds itself in a process of modernization and development of its digital tools, focused on facilitating civic participation, a target that is also reflected in the portal of Open Data itself, which is provided with communication channels for the residents of the city and for programmers and entrepreneurs that should request information.

The Open Data Portal has been developed through a contract with the Telefonica group within the framework of the FIWARE program. FIWARE is a platform driven by the European Union for the development and global deployment of applications within the Internet of the Future.