Towards a Pan-European E-Procurement Platform to Aggregate, Publish and Search Public Procurement Notices Powered by Linked Open Data: the Moldeas Approach

This paper aims to describe a public procurement information platform which provides a unified pan-European system that exploits the aggregation of tender notices using linking open data and semantic web technologies. This platform requires a step-based method to deal with the requirements of the public procurement sector and the open government data initiative: (1) modeling the unstructured information included in public procurement notices (contracting authorities, organizations, contracts awarded, etc.); (2) enriching that information with the existing product classification systems and the linked data vocabularies; (3) publishing relevant information extracted out of the notices following the linking open data approach; (4) implementing enhanced services based on advanced algorithms and techniques like query expansion methods to exploit the information in a semantic way. Taking into account that public procurement notices contain different kinds of data like types of contract, region, duration, total amount, target enterprise, etc., various methods can be applied to expand user queries easing the access to the information and providing a more accurate information retrieval system. Nevertheless expanded user queries can involve an extra-time in the process of retrieving notices. That is why a performance evaluation is outlined to tune up the semantic methods and the generated queries providing a scalable and time-efficient system. Moreover, this platform is supposed to be especially relevant for SMEs that want to tender in the European Union (EU), easing their access to the information of the notices and fostering their participation in cross-border public procurement processes across Europe. Finally an example of use is provided to evaluate and compare the goodness and the improvement of the proposed platform with regard to the existing ones.