Description
Public procurement has a tremendous impact on the EU economy, representing more than 14% of the EU GDP. This project aims to re-use and harmonize massive amounts of open public procurement data available at the EU Data Portal, the Tender Electronic Daily (TED), in combination with open public procurement datasets from Member States (MSs) portals that contain additional sets of contracts from national, regional and local public administrations that are not currently available in TED, namely the Spanish Data Portal for Public Procurement (PLACE). This is to be achieved by deploying a scalable HPC infrastructure able to support cross-domain, innovative, NLP and AIservices that interoperates with other DSI building blocks. The proposal aims to ensure better integration of the procurement data sources from different MSs in at least three directions:
1. Increased coverage of the procurement operations visible at European level.
2. Metadata enrichment and quality improvement using ontology engineering (OE), natural language processing(NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI).
3. Development of a semantic similarity among procurement documents using non-structured text analysis. The resulting procurement dataset, enriched using next-generation language technologies for data organization andimproved semantic search, will form a new and large procurement open dataset that will be shared using theEuropean Data Portal, national and local portals.
The project also aims to exploit the new open dataset by developing a series of services in cooperation with Public Administrations included as consortium members:
1) A semantic-based procurement search tool based on topic information or search by example,
2) A Procurement Viewer tool providing web access to navigation tools and panelsthat integrate thematic information extracted from the AI algorithms with available metadata.
These developed services will contribute to improve procurement-related KPI indicators, transparency, and to help companies (particularly SMEs) find procurement opportunities aligned with their skills, and Public Administrations improve their efficiency and reach the relevant actors.
