June 25, 2025 · 5 min read
Nowadays, data has become the most valuable asset for businesses and public administrations. Adopting a data-centric approach is key to making solid strategic decisions and developing new services or applications to derive value from data. Data comes with a cost, not just in terms of acquisition, storage, and refinement, but also in the opportunity costs of absent, inaccessible, or improperly contextualized data, negatively impacting business or public service productivity. However, managing large volumes of data within an organization is no simple task.
One way to tackle this problem is to make data accessible to the various entities and departments within an organization. Implementing data portals is not just about transparency; it is a fundamental piece for efficiency and innovation.
A data portal acts as a centralized repository that indexes all the data assets an organization possesses, functioning as a "catalog" of available data, ready to be used in any application the user desires. Furthermore, a data portal is capable of integrating and unifying information from a multitude of disparate sources, and not just data files: from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), SQL databases, or SCADA systems, to the incorporation of data published on other portals –known as data federation– which allows for automatic and efficient data synchronization. This is especially relevant in a Big Data context, where the goal is to integrate any type of useful data, and having it collected at a single point is extremely beneficial.
A data portal not only centralizes data assets for exchange but also collects all metadata¹ associated with each asset, constituting a first step towards a mature data governance model. As stated in DAMA-DMBOK, data represents both value and risk: poorly contextualized and poor-quality data (inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated) can lead to its incorrect use and, consequently, to bad decisions. Without reliable metadata, an organization does not know what data it has, what the data represents, where it originates, how it moves through systems, who has access to it, or what it means for the data to be of high quality. Therefore, an organization without metadata cannot manage its data as an asset from which to obtain value (or even worse, cannot manage its data at all).
Thus, a data portal is also useful as a metadata repository, facilitating continuous and robust metadata management. All of this positively impacts data governance, especially its security and quality, as well as the value users can derive from it, thanks to the broader context.
Therefore, a data portal not only promotes transparency, participation, and collaboration –key values for Public Administration– but also drives continuous data improvement, as the entire organization has access to it and can benefit from its use. By having a clear catalog, various working groups can easily incorporate data that might otherwise have remained hidden in isolated departments, facilitating cross-functional projects and more informed decision-making.
Because the data portal acts as a comprehensive catalog of data assets, it could be understood as a layer of an organization's Data Warehouse², prior to the development of Business Intelligence applications. A particularly relevant use case that can be implemented directly on a data portal is data visualization and dashboard generation. This significantly improves the user experience when querying data, transforming numbers and tables into intuitive and understandable graphical representations, enhancing the communication of available data and its potential application.
Dashboards offer an immediate visualization of a service or a specific area, and allow for advanced analytics by enabling interaction with the various elements of the dashboard (e.g., filtering or selecting relevant items). By presenting information in this way, the dissemination of use cases and reports is improved, achieving attractive and effective information dissemination for both the general public and internal teams, providing greater value to the organization.
Diverse solutions exist for implementing these portals, both commercial and open-source. Among the latter, CKAN is the most well-known and widely used in the field of open data portals for entities and public administrations, as it avoids vendor lock-in situations and provides a completely transparent tool.
Recently, APSL|Nagarro won the bid for the development of the Water Cycle Open Data Portal of Aguas Municipales de Alicante, Empresa Mixta S.A. Water cycle management is a complex process encompassing multiple stages and involving various actors: both public entities and private companies, as well as regulatory and environmental bodies. The fragmentation of information, spread across different stages and actors, can hinder its integration, contextualization, and access, which in the long run can impede strategic decision-making and interaction with stakeholders of water cycle management entities. In this context, a data portal stands as a key tool to centralize information, providing a structured catalog that facilitates the consultation, reuse, and exchange of data from different sources at a single access point, thus benefiting all actors involved in water cycle management –either public or private. Thus, the data portal, currently under development and based on the aforementioned CKAN paradigm, represents a significant advance in the digitalization of the water cycle, contributing to transparency and accountability, and to the efficiency in its management and the development of innovative technological and political solutions.
Furthermore, APSL|Nagarro has had the privilege of developing a technological solution in collaboration with Mercator Ocean International to disseminate information about marine environmental satellite observation systems, which was was presented at the last United Nations Ocean Conference held on June 9th in Nice. This web application compiles monographs on interesting case studies and also includes a dashboard that serves as a digital twin of the ocean to visualize observation systems in real time. This tool allows users, from scientists to policymakers and interested public, to analyze data interactively and understand the vital importance of marine observation systems. Although this application is not a portal as such, its development was made possible thanks to an existing open data store and a robust data governance model; namely, the Copernicus Marine Data Store. Thanks to this service, multiple open data sources are available, widely contextualized –even if they come from different organizations– and ready to be used and combined via download or API. In fact, APSL|Nagarro is designing and implementing the Marine Product Information Tool, a web service to manage the metadata of oceanographic products from the Copernicus Marine Data Store itself.
Investing in data portals is, therefore, an investment in the future. It is an indispensable step towards building more transparent, efficient, and innovative administrations, capable of maximizing the transformative potential of data. Now more than ever, in a context of increasing use of multiple interacting Artificial Intelligences (AI), having a centralized catalog that facilitates data governance becomes essential for the development of new innovative projects.
¹ Although the most common definition of metadata is "data about data", this view can be overly simplistic. Metadata provides significant information about data, not just the more typical technical aspects (like creation date, format, etc.), but also the concepts they represent, the relationships between them, the technical and business processes involved, their rules and restrictions, their logical and physical data structures, and much more. In summary, anything that provides information about the data.
² A Data Warehouse is a data storage system for delivering advanced analytics and Business Intelligence applications.
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