Frequently asked questions

OpenCoesione is the open government initiative on cohesion policies in Italy. The portal contains navigable data on planned resources and expenditures, locations, thematic areas, programming and implementing bodies, timings, implementation and payments of individual projects. Everyone can thus evaluate how resources are used in comparison to the needs of the territories.

OpenCoesione offers access to navigable and downloadable open-format data on the implementation of cohesion policies in Italy of the projects financed by the European Structural Funds, the National Development and Cohesion Fund (FSC) and the Complementary Operational Programmes (POC). More specifically, the information includes data on resources allocated and spent, location, thematic areas, planning authorities and implementing authorities, the implementation timetable for individual projects and the associated bimonthly series of payments. 

On OpenCoesione it is also possible to download information on the programmed Resources, the financial allocations of Plans and Programmes, on the funding opportunities, the calls for proposals and the lists of operations and beneficiaries eligible for funding in the Programmes co-financed by the 2014-2020 Structural Funds; data on the context of the territory in which cohesion policy projects are implemented (Istat territorial and thematic indicators and Territorial Public Accounts).

Point of attention! Only a selection of the information connected with cohesion policies that can be downloaded in open data format can be consulted using interactive visualizations on the website. For more information, consult here.

The Programmes whose Managing Authority is not an Italian administration are not displayed.

As regards 2007-2013, there are no data on the projects being implemented under the objective of the European Territorial Cooperation (ETC), also known by the name of "Interreg" (more details here).

OpenCoesione does not provide information on misconduct in respect of cohesion policy projects: at the European level, the regulations foresee specific procedures for managing misconduct, i.e. generic violations of provisions that adversely impact the Community finances for which the EU seeks restitution of amounts unduly disbursed. The body dedicated to highlighting fraud and judicial cases on the beneficiaries of the Structural Funds is OLAF, which however only publishes aggregate data (http://ec.europa.eu/anti_fraud/index_it.htm). 

OpenCoesione is targeting everyone: citizens, public administration representatives, experts, innovation entrepreneurs, researchers and journalists. The goal is to provide everyone access to data and other information to assess the effectiveness and consistency of the use of cohesion policy resources.

Discover OpenCoesione by watching a video tutorial dedicated to the initiative.

Follow OpenCoesione by signing up for the newsletter.

Encourage OpenCoesione by actively contributing to civic monitoring initiatives.

Contact the Team here to send ideas, advice, reports and examples of reuse (applications, services, research) based on OpenCoesione data.

Information on projects being implemented on the website includes selected data that can be downloaded in open data format, which represent a subset of the information foreseen by the Unitary Monitoring System.

The portal is thus the first example of reuse of the complete datasets published on OpenCoesione in order to provide all users an interactive guide to navigate the complexity of the data on projects financed by cohesion policies. The portal’s functionalities include the visualization of a factsheet for each project and the application of filters (theme/nature/programme/value/year/source) to facilitate searches for specific sets of projects. In addition, the website provides – in association with the various queries posed by users – the list of projects with the highest funding, the most recent projects completed and the municipalities that have received the greatest per capita funding.

OpenCoesione also gives users suggestions about projects that could be considered “similar” to the one they are viewing if they are located in the same area, using four criteria:

• projects with the same thematic classification (metadata fields: oc_tema_sintetico and qsn_descr_tema_prioritario_ue)

• projects of the same nature as the intervention (metadata fields: cup_descr_natura and cup_descr_tipologia)

• projects with the same planning authority

• projects with the same implementing authority

Point of attention! Some of the projects published on OpenCoesione have additional information available above and beyond that from the variables selected from the portal’s data sources. It comes from open data published by other bodies, which OpenCoesione uses to enrich the project factsheet displayed.  

For projects in implementation, OpenCoesione makes available a subset of the information provided by the Unitary Monitoring System concerning the cost and financial state of progress of the project, its sectoral or thematic scope, where it is being implemented, the entities or persons involved, the implementation timetable and the indicators of bimonthly time series of financial commitments and payments.

The level of detail and comprehensiveness of the data may differ due to inconsistencies in the data or the inhomogeneous uploading of data to the Unitary Monitoring System by the bodies involved.

The data on the projects, accompanied by the related metadata, can be downloaded on the open data page in the form of a complete relational database (in the section "The database of OpenCoesione projects") and as a single table that can be easily edited (in the section "All projects of OpenCoesione"). They can also be downloaded in reprocessable form (.csv format) as a result of queries created ad hoc through the filters available (e.g. theme, territory and type of intervention) on OpenCoesione.

The OpenCoesione database consists of a total of 16 datasets, all connected to the main "Projects" dataset which contains the master data of all the projects in implementation available on the portal.

The Projects/Subjects/Locations/Phases/Indicators datasets contain precise monitoring data, while the Commitments and Payments datasets report, in the form of a historical series, the amounts relating to the individual payments made and the financial commitments for each project. The "Scope" datasets contain detailed information on how the projects are organized on the basis of the Programme or Plan to which they belong, distinctly by programming period and funding source. The projects that come together in several programming areas (for example projects financed with ERDF and FSC funds in the 2014-2020 period) are present in the related area datasets (ERDF1420 area and FSC1420 area).

The single dataset "Projects with extended layout" constitutes a compact version of the OpenCoesione database, since it adds to the master data of the projects also information on the location, on the procedural phases, on the connected subjects, on the associated indicators and on the articulation and classification within Programmes or Plans. It does not include historical series data on commitments and payments.

If the user's interest is addressed at a programming period or to one or more specific programming areas, regional territories or themes, the data of the "Projects with extended layout" dataset can also be downloaded disaggregated, taking into account the fact that projects that converge in several regions or funds can be repeated in the individual reference datasets.

By default, the portal displays a redefined perimeter net of some projects soon to be dismissed from monitoring, consequently the number of records in the Projects dataset that can be downloaded from the open data page is higher than the number of projects as reported on the portal, and coincides with the number of projects object of the RGS-IGRUE Bulletins.

Point of attention! The data downloaded on the Open data page contains a higher number of variables than those displayed in the project and subject tabs of the portal.

The OpenCoesione website publishes the data on ongoing projects that have been financed with cohesion policy funds (2007-2013, 2014-2020 and 2021-2027) and are contained in the Unitary Monitoring System operated by RGS-IGRUE. Starting from the update of the data as at 31 December 2016, the publications take into account the gradual adjustment of the data and are intended to provide as much as possible consistent and representative visualization of cohesion policy actions.

In particular, a new feature has been introduced to permit the default visualization of data and calculations for the set of projects not taking into account other certain projects that, while indicated as “active” in the Unitary Monitoring System, are scheduled to be dismissed from monitoring in the subsequent bimonthly updates by the managing authorities involved as they are duplicates of other active projects or have never actually been launched in the Operational Programmes. Accordingly, those projects are systematically excluded from all visualization and calculations on the portal, such as, for example, those reported on the home page and the pages aggregated by nature, theme, territory and programme.

“Search” results also provide by default a list aligned with visualizations and calculations, showing only “published projects”. However, in order to ensure maximum transparency in respect of the contents of the Unitary Monitoring System, the data on projects in the dismissing process can be included in the list of results using the new filter “Visualisation” and selecting “Excluded projects”.

The projects excluded from visualization and counting are in any case included in the universe of All OpenCoesione projects published in the open data section: to that end, the data structure of the “Projects” dataset of the open data catalogues classifies the excluded projects using a value for the new variable “OC_FLAG_VISUALIZZAZIONE” other than 0. This means that to reconstruct the totals for the tallies published on the website using the open data, it is necessary to select all the projects for which the variable “OC_FLAG_VISUALIZZAZIONE” is equal to 0.

The number of monitored projects represents the total number of projects currently being implemented in the reference two-month period. Projects whose monitoring is expected to be dismissed from the National Monitoring System are excluded from this counting. All monitored projects are displayed and navigable on the portal OpenCoesione.

The OpenCoesione website has a list of the funding opportunities at disposal of potential beneficiaries of the programmes financed under cohesion policy for the 2021-2027 and 2014-2020 period. The list consists of a standardized-format collection of the information published by the managing authorities of Operational Programmes and Plans co-financed with European Structural funds. The list of sources is available here.

For the 2014-2020 period the opportunities are differentiated between those to be launched, those in progress and those expired, and are listed in chronological order of expiry, starting from those with the closest deadlines for the presentation of project proposals. If several opportunities have the same expiration date, they are sorted by Programme and then by decreasing amount.

Some of the opportunities, however, do not have a defined deadline and remain open until the funds are available: these opportunities are designated as “rolling” in the Opportunity Type column and reported at the bottom of the table together with pre-information notices, which are also identified in the same column.

All the columns can be rearranged, depending on the user's needs, in ascending or descending order, for example by Programme that offers the opportunity, by date of publication, by financial allocation of the call and finally by type (deadline, rolling, pre-information).

It is also possible to search for opportunities using the free-text search engine, which operates over the entire list regardless of the number of rows visualized, using multiple search terms. For example, to look for opportunities whose title contains the word “innovation” published by the Region of Calabria with a specified deadline, users can use three search terms: innovation, Calabria and deadline. Since the search is based on the exact text entered in the search field, it is recommended that users begin with general terms and refine their search subsequently.

The data in the list, which is generally updated every two weeks, are also available in open format in a .CSV file published on the same page with the list of opportunities and in the open data section of the website, which also contains other variables concerning the fund, the type of beneficiary and the theme for each opportunity.

Starting from the update as of 30th June 2022, OpenCoesione portal releases data relating to the Development and Cohesion Plans (PSC) identified during the 2014-2020 programming period. The availability and the update of PSCs in the National Monitoring System is an activity that foresees the elimination of projects from the previous initial FSC Plans or Programmes and the simultaneous inclusion in the new PSCs, where the monitoring of their implementation is foreseen to continue.

This activity, carried out by each administration with the support of IGRUE and Agency for Territorial Cohesion, is differentiated over time for each individual PSC. Until the migration in the National Monitoring System is completed, the framework of projects and financial resources in each PSC published on OpenCoesione is partial.
In the summary pages of the portal for each PSC, the migration current status is indicated as well as those plans or programmes representing the origin for the projects not yet migrated. In addition to the projects that will undergo the migration process, each PSC can be populated with projects from European programmes of the 2014-2020 period following the COVID-19 emergency response strategy with cohesion policies, and new projects financed with the PSC's own resources.

As of the data update as at 31 August 2023, there are 14 Programmes for which the migration is still in progress:

- 8 relate to the 2014-2020 period, namely ABRUZZO AGREEMENT, EMILIA-ROMAGNA REGION PSC, CITY OF BARI AGREEMENT, CITY OF CATANIA AGREEMENT, CITY OF FLORENCE AGREEMENT, CITY OF MESSINA, CITY PACT OF PALERMO, CITY PACT OF VENICE;

- 6 relating to the 2007-2013 period, namely PAR BOLZANO, PAR ABRUZZO, PRA ABRUZZO, ABRUZZO SERVICE TARGETS, PRA BASILICATA, PAR EMILIA-ROMAGNA.

Yes, some of the projects published on OpenCoesione have extra information available above and beyond that from the variables selected from the website’s data sources. It comes from open data published by other bodies, which OpenCoesione uses to enrich the project fact sheet displayed. For example, this is the case of the summaries of the interventions associated with the National Operational Programme Governance and Technical Assistance ERDF 2007-2013 and the National Operational Programme Research and Competitiveness ERDF 2007-2013. In these cases, the project fact sheet also contains links to the original data source.

The entities involved in cohesion policy projects can be public or private (Public Administrations, a non-profit institutions, an individual person or an enterprise) and can assume two different roles in one or more projects:

• Planning authority: the entity responsible for the decision to finance the project. It is generally a Regional Authority or a Ministry.

• Implementing authority: the entity responsible for implementing the project. In the case of the Structural Funds 2007-2013, it corresponds to the "beneficiary" (Art. 2 of Regulation (EC) no. 1083/2006), namely the entity that receives the funding. The implementing authority may in turn use other entities in implementing the project, but under the rules of the 2007-2013 period, these are not necessarily tracked in the monitoring system.

• Beneficiary: a public or private body responsible for the implementation of operation. In case of the projects comprised in the Programmes financed by EAFRD and/or by EMFF corresponds with a natural person. In the context of State aid schemes, the beneficiary is intended as the body which receives the aid; and in case the project takes the form of a financial instrument, the beneficiary is the body that implements the financial instrument. In European Territorial Cooperation Programmes, there may be several beneficiaries considering that projects are implemented by international partnerships composed by public and/or private organizations

• Executor: the party that actually executes the project; in the case of public works, it is the entity awarded with the contract and that actually executes the works; in the same way, for a project to purchase goods or services, the executor is the entity to which the contract to provide the goods or service was awarded

In the case of cohesion policy projects for which the department involved has reported in the title or among the entities involved in the project identified in the Unitary Monitoring System the tax ID number of an individual, this information is not published on the OpenCoesione website and is masked with the phrase *codice fiscale*.

 In the case of projects targeted at individuals in disadvantaged circumstances, the first and last names are also masked, using the phrase *individuo*.

This page provides details on the terms and conditions of use for the OpenCoesione website.

The funding monitored indicates the total public funding referred to the monitored projects, net of any savings. The funding monitored includes funding from all financial sources, while it does not include funding coming from private entities. The cohesion amount stands for the part of the monitored public funding which is financed by European and national resources of the cohesion policies.

The difference between the funding monitored and the cohesion amount is the co-financing "attracted" by the cohesion policies that represents ordinary resources, coming from the national, regional or municipal level, which contribute to the financing of the projects.

Payments monitored represent the total amount of payments disbursed for a particular monitored project, while cohesion payments indicate the amount of total payments referring to cohesion policy resources and therefore represent the portion of payments financed by European or national cohesion funds.

It is an aggregation carried by automatic algorithms based on: 

• EU priority themes and EU intervention fields associated with individual projects co-financed respectively in the two programming periods 2007-2013 and 2014-2020; 

• sectoral classifications of the CUP System. 

In attributing a project to a synthetic theme, the guiding criteria is the connection with the EU priority themes or EU intervention fields. Only in case of absence or inapplicability of the latter the CUP classification prevails. 

Starting from the publication of the updated data as of 28th February 2022, the synthetic themes of OpenCoesione are 11: Research and innovation, Networks and digital services, Enterprises' competitiveness, Energy, Environment, Culture and tourism, Transport and mobility, Employment and labour, Social inclusion and health, Education and training, Administrative capacity. 

Up to 31st December 2021 there were 13 instead.

It is possible to consult the comparison among the synthetic themes, EU priority themes , intervention themes and CUP classification.

The Focuses of OpenCoesione represent aggregations of ongoing projects that refer to specific sector policies or to specific Strategies, financed with Cohesion funds starting from 2007 to today. The focuses are the result of in-depth analyzes and studies carried out by thematic experts in the specific sector or of the policy of the cohesion policy.

For each policy study are available: the data (csv files and metadata) relating to the sectors analyzed in dedicated pills, as well as the latest updated data available on the portal.

The single focuses are released after the publication of a new bimonthly update of the data searchable on the portal in the "Focus" search category.

There are two main differences between these two typologies of data available on the OpenCoesione portal.

The Synthetic Themes stand for automatic classification of all the projects monitored on the portal, while the Focuses are defined by thematic experts operating in the specific sector or in the sector of the policies of the cohesion policy, based on the detailed analysis of each of the projects.

The second difference stands in the attribution: the automatic algorithm classifies each project to only one synthetic theme, while the single project may be attributed to more then one Focuses at the same time.

At the current stage the Focuses published on the portal are not related to all the projects. On the contrary all the projects published on the portal are classified by only one synthetic theme.

The per capita values reported on the website are calculated by taking the overall funding (or the total payments) of the projects associated with a municipality, province or region and dividing that by the resident population using ISTAT figures for the same municipality, province or region at 31 December 2011.

The regional per capita values refer to all projects at the regional, provincial or municipal level, while the provincial per capita values refer to all projects at the provincial or municipal level and the municipal per capita values refer to projects at the municipal level. Accordingly, the municipal per capita values do not include any provincial- or regional-level projects.

“National” projects are only considered in calculating the average national per capita value given as a comparison on the indicator toolbar.

Attention! In the case of multi-location projects, i.e. projects located in more than one municipality, province or region, in OpenCoesione each territory is associated with the entire funding for the project.

Each project is assigned to a territory which can be at national, regional, provincial or municipal level.

The regional map shows all projects located at a regional or lower level; the provincial map shows all projects located at a provincial or municipal level. Regional-level projects are not shown in the provincial map. Projects located at the national level are not shown on any map, as the maps only go up to the regional level.

Point of attention! A project can be located in more than one municipality, province or region. In that case, at each territorial level it is attributed in its entirety to each of the locations in which it is present.

The maps display the number of projects and the corresponding value of the associated resources (total public funding or payments made).

Compared with the display given in the per capita value maps, these are calculated by taking the total funding (or the total payments) of the projects associated with a municipality, province or region and dividing by the resident population using ISTAT figures for the same municipality, province or region at 31 December 2011. 

The value classes represented on the maps are defined using the Jenks algorithm (Jenks natural breaks classification method), which optimizes the distribution in classes while minimizing the variance within each class and maximizing the variance between the classes.

The navigable and downloadable monitoring data available on the OpenCoesione portal are updated when the data source is updated represented by the Unitary Monitoring System, managed by the Inspectorate-General for Financial Relationships with the European Union (IGRUE) of the State General Accounting Department (Ragioneria Generale dello Stato - RGS). Data are updated on a bimonthly basis by all the bodies involved in implementing cohesion policy in Italy and are published on OpenCoesione about two months after the reference date. 

The data on the cohesion policy context are updated with different frequencies: for example the territorial and thematic indicators of ISTAT database are updated on a monthly basis,  the data of the Regional Public Accounts are updated annually. The different update dates are shown at the bottom of the description of the individual datasets on the open data page.

The OpenCoesione data are accompanied by metadata and a license agreement.  The data are available in CSV format. In some cases the files are compressed for easier downloading.

The OpenCoesione CSV file settings are:

·     encoding: Unicode (UTF-8)

·     language: Italian (Italy)

The CSV files use the comma as the decimal separator (the European standard).

The open data on projected funded under cohesion policy initiatives are organized on a relational basis: "Projects" is the main dataset and can be downloaded alone, while "Locations", "Entities" and "Payments" provide information connected with the main dataset through a key field that identifies the same project in the various tables.

The open data on the cohesion policy context, from the expenditure certified to the European Union to social and economic data broken down at the territorial level, from statistical indicators to the Regional Public Accounts.

The data are also available in JSON format through the OpenCoesione APIs.

The OpenCoesione API is an application interface that allows any external software component to access OpenCoesione data on projects and subjects financed by cohesion policies in Italy released under the CC-BY 4.0 license The software components can be developed by third parties, using any technology. The OpenCoesione API adopts the REST architecture. Anyone can access the API, starting from the url http://www.opencoesione.gov.it/api

The API is navigable with browsers through hypertext links, like a normal website. All data can be accessed both with anonymous users for a maximum of 12 requests per minute and with registered users for a maximum of 60 requests per minute. The registration request must be sent to the email address info@opencoesione.gov.it

The data is available in HTML format and in JSON format. The HTML format allows navigation among the data and the visualization of the integrated documentation (in English), which describes the advanced use, for the benefit of the developers. Assets are presented in HTML format unless specified otherwise, and to access the JSON format of an asset, just add .json.

An example:

http://opencoesione.gov.it/api/progetti (HTML)

http://opencoesione.gov.it/api/progetti.json (JSON)

These main resources are exposed:

Projects - List of projects, filterable by theme, nature or territory

Subjects - List of subjects, filterable by theme and role

Aggregates - Aggregate information, reflect the information shown in the pages of the site.

To simplify the work of developers, accessory lists are also available:

Nature - List of project natures

Themes - List of project summary themes

Territories - List of territories

Programmes - List of programs (both European and national)

The OpenCoesione data are released with the CC-BY 4.0 license.

This is the Attribution 4.0 International with BY (Attribution) condition. Thus, it is possible to share, adapt, redistribute the data; use the data for commercial purposes as long the following condition applies:

• attribution of the credit to the dataset(s) indicating the source and - where possible - the URL of the webpage where the datasets / content to be licenesed is published

The choice of the Attribuzione licence is aimed at promoting the creation of new products and contents born from the reuse of published data.

Boundaries related to regions, provinces and municipalities are extracted from the official shapefiles from Istat.

The OpenCoesione portal is a web application developed in Django/Python using a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database for the data storage and uWSGI/Nginx as a web server. Figures and text information concerning projects and beneficiaries are indexed using the Apache Solr document search platform.

The following are the components of OpenCoesione’s software stack:

·         jQuery
·         Bootstrap
·         NGINX
·         uWSGI
·         Django
·         Solr
·         Redis
·         PostgreSQL
·         pandas
·         Docker
·         Ubuntu 20.04 server di Gnu-Linux

You can download web app source code here: https://gitlab.depp.it/depp/open-coesione-2

The projects falling within the Framework Programme Agreements (APQ) signed as part of the National Strategy for Internal Areas (SNAI) and included in the National Monitoring System (SNM) based on the criteria set out in the IGRUE operational note for monitoring the National Strategy for Internal Areas and further notes which include:

• Criteria A: association with the complex Project relating to the Project Area / Internal Area of ​​the Strategy to which the project refers

• Criteria B: association with the Implementation Tool relating to the Framework Programme Agreement to which the project refers.

Projects which - while respecting the monitoring criteria - are not compatible with the Internal Areas National Strategy are temporarily excluded from this set, until the alignment of the monitoring data expected in the upcoming future updates.

Among the most frequent reasons that lead to the exclusion of a project are:

• the attribution to an Internal Area of ​​a project located in a Municipality not belonging to the Area

• the attribution to an Internal Area of ​​a project funded by Programmes / Plans / Attributions by law that not included in the Framework Programme Agreement of a specific Area

The inclusion in the National Monitoring System of data on projects in progress takes place separately and in parallel by the various Administrations responsible for monitoring the Programmes.

On occasion of the update at  31/10//2022 OpenCoesione makes available for the first time the data relating to the first assignments in the FSC 2021-2027 approved by CIPESS.

The single protocol 21-27 is being defined which will also allow for all the cohesion policy programmes envisaged by the 2021-2027 Partnership Agreement, the transmission of data to the new Unitary Data Bank BDU 2021-2027.