TRS: Transparency and sustainability platform for compliance with the transparency law by public and private bodies

Law 19/2013, on Transparency, Access to Information and Good Governance, established that all public administrations and other obliged bodies (public companies and entities that receive public subsidies) had to actively publish financial and non-financial information on their websites and electronic offices in order to account for their activity, with entry into force in December 2014 for bodies of the General State Administration and in December 2015 for the rest. In Asturias, compliance with the principles set out in the regional transparency law, then in the final stage of approval, was also required.

The publication of the information had to follow a series of technical requirements established by the law: ease of interpretation, accessibility, quality, interoperability, and reusability, for which the use of technology was practically indispensable.

TRS consisted of the research, design, and development of a platform that would allow public and private bodies to comply with the transparency law, simplifying the process of publishing the required information and meeting its technical principles: ease of interpretation and usability through textual information supported by visualizations; open, interoperable, and standardized formats, based on open data; accessibility, based on universal design and the W3C accessibility guidelines; and interoperability, taking the Spanish technical interoperability standards (NTI) as a reference.

The novelty of the project lay in three fundamental aspects:

• Use of interoperable, standardized, and open formats (open data) throughout the process, from information capture to its visualization, converting source data that did not have these characteristics to encourage its reuse by third parties.
• Functional and technical traceability of the information, extracted in an unattended manner from its sources, so that its provenance could be established at any time.
• Compliance by all visualizations generated with the system with the accessibility and mobility standards promoted by the W3C.