OPENTIA, OpenERP Partner España

The task of OPENTIA during the Spanish Interoperability Framework Project has been mainly backing Telefónica Soluciones in the development and coaching to the Ministry of Public Administrations, in the matters of technical standards and technical interoperability. As well, OPENTIA has also done, in collaboration with several academic experts integrated in our projet team: Reports about semantic interoperability, organizative interoperability, interoperability services, interoperability along the time; researchs on international case law regarding interoperability; ontology and catalogation process of standards and technologies; market researchs about the main interoperability technologies; researchs about "libre" solutions available for each technical standard; accesibility studies; coaching in the management and preservation of documents; advicing on security and privacy matters; etc.

Spanish Interoperability Framework, a scientific study about interoperability

One of the main results of the research done by the OPENTIA team, has been the analysis and catalogation of more than 500 standards, technologies and technical specifications, according to the precepts defined by the Law 11/2007, the Spanish case law and the EU acquis communautaire. Part of such results can be seen in the following extract of statistical conclusions. They have been obtained, from our reports, by responsible public servants of the Ministry of Public Administrations, and were presented during the Spanish W3C Day at 2009.

The first graph shows how the field of study is shared among standardization bodies and other entities in the field. It shows the number of standards studied (400 at that moment) and the diversity of sources of the analyzed technologies:

This second graph shows one of the main conclusions obtained after the consultancy and research: about 80% of the analysed ITC interoperability technologies are open standards according to the definition of "open standard" written in the Law 11/2007:

This second conclusion, together with some other also obtained, drives to assure that the Law and the Spanish Interoperability Framework can be implemented in the real world: "For almost all the features researched, in practical terms, has been demonstrated that the Public Sector can serve to the citizens using open standards", states Alberto Barrionuevo, CEO of OPENTIA.

Other conclusions obtained during these two years of researchs can be: a) One of the main reasons that close standards are software patents; b) One of the functional areas that are more closed is multimedia (audio and video), and mainly due to software patents; c) There is a big percentage of standards, granted by the national and international bodies, that have little or no acceptation in the market; d) different well spreaded formats and protocols have not been standardized by any official standardization body, but, no matter of this, they could match perfectly with the spirit of the Law 11/2007 at the time to be consider "open standards"; e) There are closed technologies that frequently use legal subterfugies and technological twists to look like open; Etc.

OPENTIA has developed several reports for Telefónica and the Ministry of Public Administrations, as for, in a more scientific order, to universities as the Politechnical University of Madrid. These reports will be timely released and published at the website www.opentia.es.

About OPENTIA and the interoperability

The OPENTIA team started its labour regarding the Law 11/2007 in the begining of the year 2007, developing several reports and public conferences in Spain, Europe and Latin America that would serve to the legislators during the creation and approval of the Law. Mainly they are related to interoperability, technical neutrality, technological discrimination of the citizens, open standards and FLOSS. Almost all the advices provided by our expert team, mainly through the open community Project Estándares Abiertos ("open standards", in Spanish) were finally incorporated to the Law.

Furthermore, that fact, for that time OPENTIA had developed another digital interoperability framework for a regional Spanish government (not public yet) and adviced during more than a year to the Presidency of Ecuador in such matters. Many of the conclusions obtained in such works served as conceptual base, together with the "Criterios de Seguridad, Normalización y Conservación de las aplicaciones para el desarrollo de las potestades", for the design of the Spanish Interoperability Framework and its depending official rules and procedures.

After this, OPENTIA was contracted by Telefónica in 2007 for its labour of advicing on such matters, task that has been continued until middle of 2009 when the Government decided to supress any external influences to its work.

Up to the date OPENTIA Group has developed works in consultancy and coaching, related to interoperability, for different governmentts and public administrations. Among them are included: Ministry of Public Administrations of Spain, Government of Andalusia, Basque Government, Presidency of Ecuador, Government of Extremadura, Government of Cuba, European Commission, European Patent Office, several parliamentary groups of the Spanish Parliament and the European Parliament, etc.

With these and other initiatives, OPENTIA offers itself to its clients and to the society, probing again to be a pioneer company that suits to the paradigms of the current Digital Age.

^{Headquarters of OPENTIA Group in the Technological Park of Andalusia (Malaga, Spain)}