TEDective

The overarching aim of the TEDective is making European public procurement data explorable for non-experts. A related aim is to bring is to bring the XML files published by the European Union (opens in a new tab) into shape by transforming them to the Open Contracting Data Standard (opens in a new tab).

Why is this needed?

Despite a range of previous efforts to parse and analyse TED data, there currently exists no offering that fulfils all of the following requirements with regards to the provision of TED data:

1. It is built and published under a free software license.
2. It offers a current, cleaned and deduplicated version of TED data.
3. Data is available as OCDS-compliant JSON, both as bulk downloads and via a capable and well-documented API.

Sustainably providing long-term access to European tender data in a way that fulfils these three requirements enables numerous applications that might be of interest to civil society, business and government which could greatly enhance the transparency and accountability of European business activity. There are a range of interesting questions that can be answered with this data if it was available in a well-documented and easy-to-understand format that is interoperable with tender data published elsewhere.

What's inside?

TED XML notices are downloaded and parsed by TEDective Parser into TerminusDB (opens in a new tab). An API built with FastAPI (opens in a new tab) and GraphQL (opens in a new tab) sits in front of this database and provides access to OCDS entities, such as organizations, awards, releases or contracts. On the top of it there is a UI build with NextJS (opens in a new tab) and react-force-graph (opens in a new tab).

What other tools exist?

• TheyBuyForYou (opens in a new tab) (a project by "a consortium of 10 leading companies, universities, research centres, government departments and local authorities in the UK, Norway, Italy, Spain and Slovenia" funded by the EU Horizon 2020 (opens in a new tab) programme. The project cost the EU around €3.3 million and was developed over two years until December 2020. It is now largely dysfunctional and out-of-date. Some code seems to be publicly available (opens in a new tab) but is provided without an explicit license)

• DigiWhist's (opens in a new tab) opentender.eu (opens in a new tab) (seems somewhat abandoned, repo is still lightly maintained. Data is updated less than once a month and the frontend code is not open-source. One of the DigiWhist researchers foudned TenderX (opens in a new tab), a private for-profit tender/company data offering)

  ℹ️

  This dataset seems to be used (opens in a new tab) by the OCDS tool for scraping globally available OCDS data releases.

• OpenTED (opens in a new tab) (seems abandoned, last commit 2015; didn't work with OCDS as it wasn't developed at the time)

• opented (opens in a new tab) (very old attempt at parsing TED data that didn't turn out to work)

• OpenTED Browser (opens in a new tab) (an academic paper about)

• ExtracTED (opens in a new tab) (according to the README, this was used to parse data between 2014-2016; last commit 5 years ago)

• eu-hack (opens in a new tab) (last commit 15 months ago, author is a data scientist at Amazon and target format is CSV, I could not run his code and achieve an error-free parsing of more recent TED data)

History