We interviewed José Norberto Mazón, full professor and promoter of the InferIA project at the Universitat d'Alacant

On May 24 we will have the presence of José Norberto Mazón , in the conference cycle of the IV Edition of the Crecer Innovando CREAMA Forum , which we began on May 10. You can sign up for the webinar: "Open data and data sharing in the business environment" , or read this interview, where he offers some hints of his next intervention.

Given your experience, how would you define open data and why is it important for companies?

• Open data is that accessible and in a format that allows its reuse. Normally, these open data are generated by public administrations and allow third parties (whether physical or legal) to have new sources to create technological products and services based on the reuse of data and that provide them with added value.

What policies and practices can be put in place to encourage open and responsible business data sharing?

• The publication of open data has always been related to public administrations, because it emanates from new forms of governance (such as open government that implies transparency and accountability). However, open data implies compliance with principles that the data called FAIR (from its English terms: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) must comply with, which are useful for any private entity. In this sense, the most important thing is that business data comply with these principles through proper management of metadata, as well as data sharing strategies that allow maintaining data sovereignty while establishing specific objectives of why data is shared.

"Data sharing allows for more useful data sources that, combined with your own data, lead to more informed decision-making."

How can open data sharing help companies improve their processes and make more informed decisions?

• Data sharing allows for more useful data sources that, combined with your own data, lead to more informed decision-making. The problem here would be to know what data is useful for each company at all times. That is why InferIA ( https://www.inferia.io/ ) arises, a data marketplace with a powerful data search engine based on Artificial Intelligence techniques, which allows companies to find the data they need at all times.

«The European Union is betting on the definition of the concept of high-value data and the obligation that these data be published in the open.»

What impact do you think the increasing availability of open data will have on the global economy and business practices?

• A lot of impact. My point of view is that the concept of open data, which has already been around for quite a few years, has been developing slowly and this has hindered its widespread impact. To give an example, the availability of certain open data in some cities and not in others, has hindered the development of applications at the city level, since they were not scalable developments. In this sense, the European Union is betting on the definition of the concept of high-value data and the obligation that these data be published in the open. A relevant aspect is that data provides more value when it can be combined from various sources. In fact, there is already a list of high-value data, approved a few months ago by the European Union. Spain, through the Data Office, is also working very well in this regard.

What advice would you give to a company considering sharing its data more openly?

• There are several aspects to take into account, but the two main ones would be (1) good internal data governance that allows proper management of metadata so that it is prepared to follow the FAIR principles; and (2) a data sharing strategy based on the available data, on the problems to be solved with the use of the data and on criteria such as security/privacy and competitiveness.