TheyBuyForYou announces the first release of the knowledge graph for public procurement, integrating tender and company data.

Public procurement affects organisations across all sectors. With tenders amounting to close to 2 trillion euros annually in the EU, it is critical that this market operates fairly and efficiently, supporting competitiveness and accountability. Data-driven insights can help make this happen, supporting buyers and suppliers alike in their procurement decisions.

TheyBuyForYou is a three year initiative bringing together researchers, innovators and public administrations from 5 European countries. It is supported by EU H2020. The aim of the programme is to make procurement data more easily accessible and hence facilitate better decisions in areas such as economic development, demand management, competitive markets and vendor intelligence. To achieve this, TheyBuyForYou leverages a range of data sources which are integrated into a knowledge graph, which is used in data analytics and decision making.

Almost eighteen months into the programme, the team is proud to announce their first release of the TheyBuyForYou knowledge graph, integrating tender and company data. As of the first quarter of 2019, the graph consists of over 23M triples (records), covering information about almost 220K tenders.

The knowledge graph is available as open source and is compatible with standards in the procurement domain:

• OCDS (Open Contracting Standard), capturing tender data throughout the contracting process.
• euBG ontology, developed European euBusinessGraph project, providing a common model for company data.

The graph capitalises on data from two market leaders in their fields: OpenCorporates (for company data), and OpenOpps (for tenders and contracts, including the Tenders Electronic daily – TED – data feed).

The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in cooperation with the Centre for Knowledge Transfer in IT at Jožef Stefan Institute are excited to be part of the TheyBuyforYou Consortium and are strongly dedicated to focus all their knowledge in developing a viable web application, which will aim to detect anomalies in public procurement system and public spending and therefore minimize corruption in Slovenia and beyond.

More information  is available at TheyBuyForYou project website.