1. Purpose

The CORDIS Spain Dashboard is a tool for analysing Spanish participation in the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (2021-2027), built from the public CORDIS dataset. This document is its methodology companion: it records the choices made during construction, explains where numbers can be misread, and flags interpretation pitfalls that an experienced National Contact Point (NCP) or analyst should know before presenting figures to colleagues or stakeholders.

This is not an exhaustive specification (see the V1 Technical Plan for that). It is a curated set of decisions, conventions, and caveats — the things you would otherwise need to re-derive every time someone questions a number on screen.

Intended audience

• NCPs presenting Spanish HE figures to delegations, ministries, or regional governments.
• Policy analysts cross-checking dashboard numbers against other sources (the Commission's Horizon Dashboard, national agency reports, ministerial briefings).
• Technical reviewers auditing the ETL methodology before broader deployment.
• Future maintainers who will update the dashboard with new CORDIS snapshots or extend it in V2.

How to read this document

Each section presents a methodology choice in roughly this order: (a) what the dashboard does, (b) why that choice was made, (c) how the numbers should be read, and (d) the most likely misinterpretation to pre-empt. Numerical examples reflect the 17 June 2026 CORDIS snapshot.

2. Data scope and snapshot

2.1 Source

The dashboard reads from the CORDIS Horizon Europe XLSX dataset published monthly by the European Commission. Specifically, six files are used in V1: project.xlsx, organization.xlsx, topics.xlsx, legalBasis.xlsx, euroSciVoc.xlsx, and policyPriorities.xlsx.

Project outputs (deliverables, publications, IPR, report summaries) and the report-article collections are not in V1 scope; they are reserved for V2.

2.2 Snapshot date

All figures in this document reflect the 17 June 2026 CORDIS snapshot. Headline counts and totals will change with each monthly refresh. The dashboard's metadata.json file always carries the generation timestamp; treat the on-page numbers as accurate to that moment.

2.3 What CORDIS contains, what it does not

CORDIS is the public-facing repository of signed Horizon Europe grants. Crucially, it does not contain:

• Submitted proposals (only signed grants appear).
• Application volumes, eligibility outcomes, or success rates.
• Evaluation scores or expert evaluator information.
• Seal of Excellence designations.
• Rejected applications under any scheme.

These proposal-stage metrics are held in eCORDA, the Commission's restricted internal database. The dashboard structurally cannot reproduce them. If a colleague asks for Spain's success rate or applications-to-grants ratio, the dashboard is not the right source.

2.4 Definition of "Spanish project"

Under the 17 June 2026 snapshot this yields 6,100 projects across all statuses. Most metrics on the dashboard subtract the 109 projects with status TERMINATED (see Section 3), leaving the canonical 5,991 figure that appears on the Overview page.

3. Treatment of TERMINATED projects

CORDIS projects can be in one of several statuses. The dashboard treats them as follows:

The reason for excluding TERMINATED from the headline metrics is alignment with the Commission's Horizon Dashboard, whose Signed Grants definition also excludes terminated projects. Including them would produce a Spanish project count of 6,100 against the Horizon Dashboard's 5,921 — a discrepancy that invites methodology challenges. Excluding them narrows the gap to 70 projects, attributable to snapshot date drift.

3.1 What gets excluded

The Monobeneficiary count drops by 90 (5.8%), proportionally more than any other metric. This is genuine: TERMINATED is over-represented among ERC grants where principal investigators left their host institution, and among MSCA-PF fellowships where fellows withdrew. The new figure is the correct "completed-or-in-progress" monobeneficiary count.

3.2 Where to find terminated projects if needed

On the Projects page, the status filter chips default to SIGNED + CLOSED, which hides terminated projects from the table. A user investigating, say, withdrawn ERC grants can deselect those chips and add TERMINATED to surface them.

4. Spanish-led, Monobeneficiary, and Participants

The dashboard splits projects with Spanish involvement into three mutually exclusive role categories. The distinction matters because the term "Spanish coordinator" is ambiguous and tends to inflate apparent leadership when applied uncritically.

4.1 Why the distinction matters

A naïve count of "Spanish-coordinated projects" yields 2,571 (42.9% of the Spanish portfolio). Read carelessly, this suggests Spain leads nearly half of its Horizon Europe projects. The reality is more nuanced:

• Of those 2,571, only 1,110 (18.5%) involve Spain leading other entities.
• The remaining 1,461 (24.4%) are individual-researcher or single-SME grants where the "coordinator" role is purely administrative. The Spanish entity hosts the work but does not coordinate anyone else.

When presenting Spanish leadership in Horizon Europe, the relevant figure is 1,110 Spanish-led projects (18.5%), not 2,571 "coordinations". The 2,571 figure is correct but easily over-interpreted.

4.2 Mechanism in the data

The classifier uses the count of beneficiary-role rows per project (role IN coordinator, participant). Roles such as thirdParty, partner (MSCA-only), associatedPartner, and internationalPartner do not count, since these do not sign the Grant Agreement and do not receive EU funding directly. This naturally produces the mono-vs-multi split.

5. EU contribution: net vs. gross

The dashboard distinguishes between three financial concepts. The default metric throughout is the most conservative one (net contribution).

5.1 Why net matters

In the June 2026 snapshot, 660 Spanish participations redistribute a combined €234.8 M to linked third parties. The gross figure assigns this amount to the redistributing entity; the net figure correctly attributes it to the third party that actually receives it. At the aggregate level the difference nearly cancels (most third parties are also Spanish), but at the entity level the distortion can be massive — e.g. an entity showing €22 M gross but only €3 M net.

5.2 Worked example

Consider a hypothetical Horizon Europe RIA project with €5 million total EU contribution, signed by:

• Spanish coordinator A — receives €1.0 M
• Spanish partner B — receives €0.4 M
• Italian partner C — receives €1.6 M
• German partner D — receives €1.5 M
• Belgian partner E — receives €0.5 M

Across the dashboard:

• The Projects page "EU contrib." column shows €5.0 M (project total).
• The Projects page "EU contrib. to ES" column shows €1.4 M (sum of A + B).
• The Overview "EU contribution to Spanish participants" KPI counts €1.4 M, not €5.0 M, towards Spain's total.
• The Regional Analysis page (if A is in Cataluña and B in Madrid) credits €1.0 M to Cataluña and €0.4 M to Madrid.
• The Collaborations page (under DE) credits €1.5 M, not €5.0 M, to Germany on Spanish-joint projects.

5.3 Why this matters

Using the project total would inflate every regional and partner figure: a single multi-country project would be counted at its full value in every region of every participant. The dashboard would over-state both Spanish funding and partner-country funding, often by 3–10×. The participation-level metric, while less impressive in headline form, is what survives technical scrutiny.

5.4 Label clarity

The Regional Analysis and Collaborations pages use labels like "EU contrib. received" and "EU contrib. to partners" to make this explicit. Tooltips on each column header restate the definition. The intent is that no reader should have to ask "is this the project total or the local share" — the label answers it.

6. The CSIC bundling artefact

The Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC) operates more than 120 institutes across Spain. In CORDIS, however, the entire organisation uses a single Participant Identifier Code (PIC: 999991722), with the central administrative address (Calle Serrano 117, Madrid) attached to every participation.

This is an organisational reality, not a data bug. Many large research councils share a single PIC across their institutes. But it creates a systematic bias for any region-level analysis.

6.1 What the dashboard does

• CSIC participations (805 in the current snapshot) are assigned to a dedicated "Multi-region (CSIC)" bucket, not to Madrid.
• This bucket is visible in the Regional Analysis ranking table and in NUTS-2 filters, but is excluded from the choropleth map (it lacks a single location).
• A footnote on the map explains why.
• On the Organisations page, CSIC appears as a single entity with all 805 participations and €371 M EU contribution.

6.2 What the Horizon Dashboard does

The Commission's Horizon Dashboard does not separate CSIC: its 805 participations and €371 M are lumped into Madrid (since the PIC address is Madrid-based). This makes Madrid appear larger than Cataluña by both project count and EU contribution.

6.3 Comparison

Methodologically this dashboard is more honest: Madrid is a region, CSIC is a pan-Spanish institution that happens to have its head office in Madrid. Adding CSIC's institute-level activity to Madrid systematically over-states Madrid's regional research output.

6.4 What to say if challenged

If someone says "the Horizon Dashboard shows Madrid leading Cataluña, but yours doesn't", the correct response is: the difference is CSIC. When CSIC is separated (as in this dashboard), Cataluña leads Spanish regional participation. When CSIC is absorbed into Madrid (as in HD), Madrid leads. Both views are defensible, but the CSIC-separated view is more meaningful for regional research-policy analysis.

7. NUTS-2 reverse-lookup for missing region codes

CORDIS organisations carry NUTS codes in the form of 5-character strings (e.g. ES511 for Barcelona). The first four characters give the NUTS-2 region (ES51 for Cataluña). However, 70 Spanish participations in the 17 June 2026 snapshot have problematic NUTS codes:

For the 44 truncated cases, the ETL uses a province-prefix-to-NUTS-2 mapping (first two digits of postal code → province → NUTS-2 region). This recovered 44 out of 70 problematic rows. The remaining 26 are typically associated partners, self-employed researchers, or individuals whose postal data is absent. They appear in an explicit Unknown region bucket on the Regional Analysis page.

8. Regional Analysis page: how to read it

8.1 Map vs. table

• The map shows only mappable NUTS-2 regions (17 of them). CSIC and Unknown buckets are excluded from the map because they lack a single geographic centroid.
• The table shows all 19 rows including CSIC and Unknown, so the totals always reconcile.
• CSIC and Unknown rows are visually muted (grey) in the table and annotated with a brief explanatory note.

8.2 The metric toggle

Switching between Participations / EU contrib. received / Entities / Coordinations changes the map's colour scale and the circle radii. The same region can appear prominent under one metric and modest under another.

8.3 "EU contrib. received" specifically

This is the sum of ecContribution across Spanish participations within the region, as explained in Section 5. A region with one large project (say a €5 M ERC grant) and a region with ten small projects (€500 K each) will show the same total. The metric is correct but does not on its own indicate the region's research intensity, only its absorptive capacity of EU funding.

8.4 Madrid figures, post-CSIC

Because CSIC's 805 participations are separated from Madrid, Madrid's row shows 2,778 participations rather than the ~3,583 a Horizon Dashboard-style aggregation would give. Anyone comparing Madrid's regional position to other sources will see this gap; it is intentional. The CSIC row is the missing piece.

9. Topics and Classifications page

9.1 The four sub-tabs

• Programme — hierarchical navigation through Pillar > Component > Programme part. Counts at each level are distinct projects with Spanish participation under that part of the programme tree. A project can appear under more than one programme part.
• Topics — sortable, year-filterable table of HORIZON call topic codes. Each row aggregates Spanish projects submitted under that specific call.
• EuroSciVoc — top-level scientific-domain breakdown with second-level drill-down. See note in 9.2 below.
• Policy priorities — five clickable cards (AI, Biodiversity, Clean Air, Climate, Digital Agenda), with full/partial alignment counts.

9.2 EuroSciVoc: percentages don't sum to 100%

Projects can be tagged with multiple EuroSciVoc codes spanning more than one top-level domain. A project on bio-inspired AI for medical imaging might appear under "Natural sciences", "Engineering and technology", and "Medical and health sciences" simultaneously.

Consequently, summing the percentages shown on each domain card on the EuroSciVoc sub-tab will give a number greater than 100%. This is by design: each percentage is the share of Spanish projects touching that domain, not an exclusive partition of the portfolio.

If someone says "the EuroSciVoc shares don't add up", the answer is: they shouldn't. EuroSciVoc tags are not mutually exclusive.

9.3 Topic year vs. project signing year

On the Topics sub-tab, the year filter is extracted from the topic code itself (a 4-digit number). This is the year of the call publication, not necessarily the year the resulting projects were signed. A topic published in HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01-01 may have signed projects in 2023, 2024, or 2025 depending on evaluation timing.

For project signing year specifically, use the Year filter on the Projects page, which is derived from the ecSignatureDate field.

9.4 Policy priorities: methodology

The Climate Mainstreaming Architecture (Commission Staff Working Document SWD(2022)225) defines three alignment levels for each tracker: 0% (no contribution), 40% (significant contribution), 100% (project's primary objective). The dashboard reports the count of projects at each level separately.

• "Fully aligned" = 100% (the policy area is the project's primary objective).
• "Partially aligned" = 40% (the project contributes meaningfully but not as primary objective).

Of the 5,991 Spanish projects, 103 lack policy_priorities data entirely (the field was not populated for them in CORDIS). These appear in the total denominator but contribute 0 to every alignment count, slightly diluting the "% of portfolio" figures shown on each card.

9.5 Climate at 58.8% — context

Spain's climate-aligned project share (fully + partially) sits around 58.8% in the current snapshot. This may look like Spanish overperformance against the EU-wide 35% climate-spend target. It is not: the 35% target is a spending target (share of budget), whereas 58.8% is a project-count share. The denominators are different, the methodology is different, and comparing them suggests an overperformance that the data does not support. Use this number for what it is: a project-level indicator of climate orientation, not a budget-share comparison.

10. Collaborations page

10.1 Scope

10.2 The country choropleth

• Colour scale is quantile-based and recomputed when the metric toggle changes. The same country may appear dark blue under "Joint projects" and pale under "EU contrib. to partners".
• Countries with no Spain-joint collaboration appear in light grey (not white) to indicate the absence of data without making them invisible.
• Spain itself is highlighted in orange as a visual cue, not as a data point.

10.3 UK and Switzerland: low EU contribution, high project count

Two associated-country anomalies are worth noting when presenting the map:

Under "Joint projects" both countries appear as strong Spanish partners. Under "EU contrib. to partners" they fall sharply. This is correct: UK and Swiss entities frequently appear on Spanish projects without receiving EU funding, because the EU pays them as third-country partners on national co-funding instead.

10.4 The 100-row organisation-pair table

The full collaborations_org_summary table contains approximately 201,000 Spanish-to-partner organisation pairs. Displaying all of them in a browser is impractical. The default view shows the top 100 by joint-project count. Filtering by Spanish entity name (substring match) narrows the view to that entity's specific international partner network.

If a user expects "all CSIC collaborations" or "all UPC collaborations" and sees only 100 rows, the fix is to type the org name in the filter — the table will then return only that entity's partners, typically several hundred to a few thousand rows depending on the entity's size.

10.5 ISO-2 code remapping

CORDIS uses two ISO-2 codes that differ from most geographic standards:

• UK (United Kingdom) — most GeoJSON files and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 use GB.
• EL (Greece) — most use GR.

The dashboard's choropleth re-maps these so the data join works correctly. Anyone cross-referencing the dashboard with external GIS data should be aware of the mapping; both codes are noted in the page footnote.

11. Special-case entities

11.1 EIT KIC Urban Mobility

EIT KIC Urban Mobility (EU PIC 945046624) is headquartered in Barcelona and therefore classified as a Spanish entity throughout CORDIS. In the 17 June 2026 snapshot it is the single largest Spanish recipient of EU contribution (€400.8 M), ahead of CSIC (€370.8 M).

It is, however, a pan-European Knowledge and Innovation Community: a single legal vehicle through which the EIT funds urban-mobility activity across many member states. The Spanish-HQ designation reflects the legal address, not the geography of the work itself.

Both this dashboard and the Horizon Dashboard count it as Spanish. Neither flags the artefact in the default view. Anyone comparing top-recipient lists across countries should know that the €400 M attributed to Spain via this PIC funds activity well outside Spain.

11.2 Brexit-affected UK entities

UK entities can appear on Spanish-joint projects, often retain their PICs in CORDIS, but typically receive €0 in ecContribution because they lost beneficiary status under the 2020 Brexit settlement. They appear with role "internationalPartner" or "associatedPartner" rather than "participant".

Counting all UK appearances as full collaborations overstates UK's substantive contribution to Spanish projects. The "EU contrib. to partners" metric is the truer measure of active UK engagement.

11.3 Swiss entities

Switzerland's association to Horizon Europe is partial: Swiss entities are excluded from many calls and from a number of categories of action under Pillar II. They appear on collaborations but their participation depth varies by call. Same caveat as UK applies.

11.4 Shared-PIC entities other than CSIC

CSIC is not the only Spanish entity where a single PIC covers multiple geographic sites, but it is the largest such case by an order of magnitude. The dashboard treats only CSIC explicitly. For smaller cases (some pharmaceutical companies, banking groups, or other research consortia) the participation appears at the corporate headquarters NUTS-2 region, which may or may not reflect where the actual research happens. This is a known limitation; full entity resolution is a V2 enhancement.

12. Cross-checks against external sources

The dashboard's figures were cross-checked against two reference sources during development. This section documents the comparison methodology, the points of agreement, and the intentional differences. The intent is to give analysts a defensible basis for the numbers shown and a clear answer to "how does this compare with what the Commission / national agency publishes."

12.1 The two reference sources

• Horizon Dashboard — the European Commission's official public dashboard of Horizon Europe data. Updated periodically. Audience: general analysts and institutional communication.
• CDTI annual report — the Spanish national funding agency's annual analysis of Spanish participation, published in Spanish. The most recent edition covers through end-2024. Audience: Spanish ministerial community, NCPs, and policy-makers.

The two sources use different methodologies, different update cadences, and different scopes. The dashboard reproduces what CORDIS makes public; both reference sources have access to deeper data (eCORDA for Horizon Dashboard; raw CORDIS plus internal eCORDA for CDTI). The cross-check therefore is not about matching their numbers exactly — it is about understanding which differences are snapshot drift, which are methodological, and which would warrant further investigation.

12.2 Cross-check against the Horizon Dashboard

The Commission's Horizon Dashboard is the closest public-facing point of comparison. The following table summarises agreement on directly comparable metrics, using the 17 June 2026 dashboard snapshot.

Most metrics match within 3%. The residual variance is attributable to snapshot-date drift (Horizon Dashboard's exact refresh date is not disclosed) and minor differences in deduplication.

The EIC discrepancy

The EIC participations gap (−13.2%) is the largest unexplained difference. The most likely cause is that the Horizon Dashboard includes Seal of Excellence projects (rejected by the EU but recommended for national funding), which this dashboard does not. A second possibility is a missing scheme-prefix in our filter (e.g. EIC Pathways or EIC Transition variants). Investigation is queued for V1.1.

Metrics the Horizon Dashboard has and this dashboard cannot

• Success rate (Horizon Dashboard: 18.47% for Spain).
• Eligible proposals (Horizon Dashboard: 33,938).
• Total applications (Horizon Dashboard: 70,344).
• Expert evaluators (Horizon Dashboard: 3,409 female evaluators for Spain).
• Seal of Excellence projects (Horizon Dashboard: 1,244 for Spain).

These metrics come from eCORDA (the Commission's restricted internal database), not from public CORDIS. The dashboard structurally cannot reproduce them in V1 or any future version without granted eCORDA access.

Metrics this dashboard has and the Horizon Dashboard does not

• Spanish-led vs. Monobeneficiary distinction (HD treats both as "coordinations").
• CSIC bucketed separately from Madrid (HD aggregates into Madrid).
• Per-project drill-down with full participant lists and per-org EU-contribution detail.
• Spanish-joint scope on the Collaborations page (HD shows partner-country statistics across all HE, not just Spanish-joint).

12.3 Cross-check against the CDTI annual report

The CDTI annual report "Spanish Participation in Horizon Europe", 2026 edition, covers the period 2021-2024. It is the reference document for Spanish policy analysis and ministerial briefings. To validate the dashboard against this reference, the dashboard's own figures were re-aggregated filtering to projects signed up to 31 December 2024, with status SIGNED or CLOSED — exactly replicating the CDTI report's time window.

Terminology mapping

12.3.1 Direct numerical comparison (2021-2024)

12.3.2 CDTI's "Liderados" methodology — reproduced

The CDTI's criterion for "Proyectos liderados" is not published in detail, but this investigation has reproduced it empirically. Applying to the dashboard the following conditions:

• A Spanish entity in the coordinator role,
• Project with two or more signing beneficiaries (multi-beneficiary),
• Funding scheme excluding ERC, MSCA-* and EIC — i.e. truly collaborative schemes (RIA, IA, CSA, JU-RIA, JU-IA, COFUND, EIT-KIC, PCP, EURATOM-RIA, etc.) without individual fellowship or individual innovation instruments.

yields 685 projects — against the 686 reported by CDTI. The 1-project difference is within snapshot-drift tolerance.

Reading: the CDTI's "Liderados" indicator specifically captures Spanish leadership of collaborative research consortia, excluding instruments where Spain is the administrative coordinator but does not lead a consortium in any substantive sense (ERC = an individual researcher; MSCA-DN/SE/COFUND = doctoral training networks; EIC = an individual innovative company). This refines our broader "Coordinator (Spanish-led)" — which is wider (937 in 2021-2024, 1,110 in 17 June 2026).

The correct answer to "how many projects does Spain lead in Horizon Europe?" therefore depends on the cut-off definition:

• 686 (CDTI criterion) — leadership of collaborative consortia in the strict sense, excludes fellowships and individual innovation.
• 937 (our "Spanish-led" in 2021-2024) — leadership of any multi-beneficiary project, includes Spanish-led training programmes (MSCA-DN, MSCA-SE).
• 1,110 (our "Spanish-led" in 17 June 2026) — same criterion as above, with more recent snapshot.

All three readings are defensible provided the criterion is documented. The 1,110 figure is what the dashboard's Overview KPI currently displays.

12.3.3 The % SME discrepancy (77.7% vs 55.4%)

The most significant divergence is the 22-percentage-point gap in the SME share among Spanish companies. The possible explanations investigated:

• Participation-level vs. entity-level counting: tested — yields 52.6% (does not close the gap).
• "Ever flagged as SME" in any participation: tested — yields 55.5% (negligible change).
• Restriction to Pillar III (EIC instruments): yields 76.4% — suspiciously close, but not the methodology CDTI uses for this row of its table.

The most likely explanation is that CDTI enriches the SME flag with Spanish national data — the SME field in CORDIS is self-declared by the participant when submitting the proposal, and many Spanish companies that technically meet the EU SME criteria do not declare it on the form. CDTI, with access to Spain's Directorio Central de Empresas and similar national registers, can determine SME status more exhaustively.

Implication: the dashboard's figure (55.4%) is a conservative lower bound on the real SME presence in Spanish Horizon Europe participation. The CDTI figure (77.7%) likely reflects reality better. For policy communication, use the CDTI figure with attribution; the dashboard serves as an order-of-magnitude check.

12.3.4 Metrics CDTI reports that this dashboard cannot

The CDTI 2026 report includes several categories that are structurally outside the dashboard's scope:

These figures come from the Commission's eCORDA database, accessible only to designated national authorities (in Spain, CDTI). The dashboard structurally cannot reproduce them without a formal eCORDA access agreement.

12.3.5 Connecting to the dashboard's current figures

The dashboard displays the state as of 17 June 2026, not the end-of-2024 cut-off of the CDTI report. To bridge the two references mentally:

The ~25% growth reflects the additional 18 months of signatures (2025 + first half of 2026) plus late signatures of 2021-2024 framework programme projects still being formalised. The stronger growth in "Total coordinated" (+34%) suggests Spain has been more active in coordination during 2025-2026 than in earlier years — a positive indicator worth dedicated analysis.

12.4 Summary of agreement and divergence

13. Presentation tips for analysts

Below are the most common ways people interpret dashboard numbers incorrectly, with the suggested correction.

14. Glossary

Beneficiary

An entity with role coordinator or participant — entities that sign the Grant Agreement and receive EU funding directly.

Coordinator (badge)

A Spanish entity that holds the coordinator role on a multi-beneficiary project. Excludes monobeneficiary cases. Synonym: Spanish-led.

CSIC bucket

An explicit "Multi-region (CSIC)" category that holds participations from PIC 999991722, separating them from Madrid where the central office is located.

ecContribution

CORDIS field — the EU contribution paid to a specific organisation in a specific project. Used throughout the dashboard for any "EU contribution to ES" figure.

ecMaxContribution

CORDIS field — the total EU contribution committed to a project across all its participants. Used only for the "EU contrib." column on the Projects page, never for aggregated regional or partner figures.

EuroSciVoc

European Science Vocabulary — a hierarchical scientific-domain classification maintained by the Commission. Projects can be tagged with multiple codes.

Joint project

A Horizon Europe project in which at least one Spanish entity participates. Used in the Collaborations page to scope partner-country aggregates.

Monobeneficiary

A project with exactly one signing beneficiary, who is Spanish. Typical instruments: ERC, MSCA-PF, EIC Accelerator.

NCP

National Contact Point — designated national experts who provide advice and support to applicants for Horizon Europe funding.

NUTS-2

Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics, level 2 — Eurostat's regional classification. Spain has 19 NUTS-2 regions plus the dashboard's CSIC and Unknown buckets.

Participant

An entity with role participant — a signing beneficiary that is not the coordinator. Synonymous with "partner" in common usage.

Participation

A single row in the CORDIS organization.xlsx — one entity's involvement in one project. A project with 8 partners produces 8 participations.

PIC

Participant Identification Code — the EU-wide unique identifier for an organisation in the Funding & Tenders Portal. One PIC per legal entity.

Pillar

Top-level structure of Horizon Europe: Pillar I (Excellent Science), Pillar II (Global Challenges), Pillar III (Innovative Europe), plus Widening (Pillar IV) and EURATOM.

Spanish-joint

A project that involves at least one Spanish entity. Used to scope the Collaborations page.

TERMINATED

A project status — the grant agreement was stopped before normal completion. Excluded from Overview metrics; visible if filtered in on the Projects page.

15. Limitations of V1 and what V2 may bring

15.1 Acknowledged limitations of V1

• Data updates are manual. The ETL must be re-run when a new CORDIS snapshot is released; the dashboard does not auto-refresh.
• Organisation deduplication is limited to PIC-level. Two legal entities with separate PICs that are in fact the same operational entity are not merged.
• No proposal-level data. All metrics about applications, eligibility, success rates, evaluation, and Seal of Excellence are unavailable.
• Project outputs (deliverables, publications, IPR, report summaries) are not included.
• The choropleth resolution on the Collaborations page is Natural Earth 110m. Three small island nations are absent from the map (but visible in the ranking table).
• Accessibility is basic (semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, colour contrast) but not formally WCAG-tested.

15.2 Likely V2 priorities

• Automated CORDIS source-checking and update workflow (GitHub Action, cron, or lightweight backend).
• Full organisation entity resolution (name matching, VAT cross-referencing).
• Embed buttons for individual charts and tables, enabling reuse on other websites.
• Project-output modules using webLink.xlsx and webItem.xlsx.
• NUTS-3 (province-level) drill-down to address Barcelona-vs-Madrid ambiguity at finer granularity.
• Formal WCAG audit and accessibility enhancements.
• EIC participation reconciliation with Horizon Dashboard.

16. Monthly Trend and automated checks

16.1 What the Monthly Trend tab shows

The Monthly Trend tab displays the aggregated evolution of Spanish participation across the monthly snapshots published by CORDIS. Unlike the rest of the dashboard, this page is not interactive through filters: the data shown are pre-computed aggregates over the full population at each snapshot, so filtering would not make sense. The filter chips bar is therefore hidden on this page.

The five sparklines show the headline KPIs (active projects, participations, distinct organisations, EU contribution, coordinations) over time. The stacked area chart decomposes the EU contribution by pillar. The two differential tables compare the latest snapshot with the previous one, sorted by |Δ EC| descending so the most significant movements appear first.

16.2 Definition of "active project" in the aggregates

Snapshots only count projects whose status is not TERMINATED, consistent with the Overview KPI definition. A participation counts as "active" if it belongs to an active project.

16.3 Automated checks (smoke tests)

On every new snapshot, the ETL script runs 10 invariants that must hold. Their purpose is to detect regressions of the kind "the sum by grouping no longer matches the total" before the data is published. The active invariants are:

1. EC by pillar ≈ EC total ±5% — the sum of EU contribution across all pillars must match the total KPI, with tolerance for cross-pillar projects (see 16.4).
2. EC by activity = EC total, exact — each participation has exactly one activity type, so the partition must be exhaustive and disjoint.
3. Participations by role = total, exact — same logic for role.
4. Distinct orgs ≤ total participations — every organisation has at least one participation.
5. Coordinations ≤ total participations — every coordination is a participation.
6. Distinct projects in ES participations = KPI projects — the project count derived from active Spanish participations must equal the displayed KPI.
7. EC total ≥ previous snapshot × 0.95 — contribution must not drop more than 5% month-on-month. A larger drop likely indicates a corrupt download or a CORDIS format change.
8. Projects ≥ previous snapshot × 0.95 — analogous for the project count.
9. NUTS-2 coverage ≥ 99% — at least 99% of Spanish participations must resolve to a known NUTS-2 code after the reverse lookup (Section 7).
10. EC by pillar ≥ 0 — no aggregate sum may be negative, defending against data-type bugs.

Invariants 7 and 8 are skipped when no previous snapshot exists. The result of each check is stored in the snapshot's JSON under the smoke_results field. If any check fails, a visible warning appears on the Monthly Trend tab.

This verification layer was introduced after a bug surfaced retroactively in V1.1: EU contribution by pillar was inflated 30× by a redundant JOIN (HORIZON.2 showed €154B instead of €3.4B). Invariant 1 would catch this automatically. The cost of adding the checks was low; the cost of not having them was high.

16.4 Cross-pillar projects and the 0.3% drift

A single project may have multiple entries in legalBasis, e.g. HORIZON.2.4 and HORIZON.4.1, if its funding spans multiple parts of the framework programme. When EU contribution is aggregated by pillar, that project counts under each of its pillars. The consequence is a small excess when summing across all pillars vs. the total KPI: typically between 0.2% and 0.5%. This is deliberate behaviour — losing the cross-pillar information (by forcing a "main" pillar) would impoverish the analysis. Invariant 1 absorbs this with the ±5% tolerance.

16.5 Auto-synthesis and NCP notes

Each snapshot includes an automatically generated narrative summary that highlights the pillar and topical component with the largest absolute growth versus the previous snapshot. Thresholds (€10M and 20 projects) are applied to discard trivial movements in small pillars like Widening or EURATOM, which can show large percentage changes with irrelevant absolute numbers.

Alongside the auto-synthesis there is an editable NCP note field, empty by default. When published with content, it is shown prominently above the auto-synthesis. It allows adding interpretive context (which call justifies a growth, which regional peculiarity explains a movement) that the algorithm cannot deduce by itself. Notes are preserved across ETL re-runs: if the same date is reprocessed, existing notes are kept and only the aggregations are recomputed.

16.6 Expected frequency and operational cadence

CORDIS publishes a new snapshot approximately on the 17th of each month. The operating procedure is: manual ZIP download, ETL run with the SNAPSHOT_DATE environment variable pointing to the CORDIS publication date (not the processing date), cross-check of the main KPIs against Horizon Dashboard and/or the CDTI annual report, and frontend bundle release if no surprises. The automated checks run as part of the ETL; their results land in the snapshot JSON and are surfaced to the user in case of failure.