Access to high quality procurement data is in many ways essential for the economy. Access to data can enable analytics and insight that helps small companies to compete in a market dominated by large enterprises, while ensuring that public procurers make informed decisions.

Much progress in opening up procurement data has been made, but numerous challenges remain. The EU-funded innovation action TheyBuyForYou has gathered procurement data from all over Europe, connected the data with reconciled company information and curated the linked data set to make it accessible for everyone.

At this workshop we will present and discuss our latest report "White paper on the publication and governance of open procurement data" with stakeholders in industry, policy-making and public procurers.

For more info, contact till.lech@sintef.no

Click here to join the meeting

Speakers:

Till C. Lech, SINTEF Digital: "TheyBuyForYou - 3 Years of Working with Open Procurement Data: Results and Outlook"

Ian MakGill, SpendNetworks/OpenOpps: "What can We Do with High Quality Procurement Data - An Impact Assessment"

Prof. Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid: "10 Recommendations for the Publication of Open Procurement Data"

Karolis Granickas, Open Contracting Partnership: "Open Contracting and the EU"

After the presentations, the speakers will be joined by Cécile Guasch and Natalie Muric from the EU Publiactions Office for a virtual roundtable discussion on how to accelerate publication of high quality procurement data.

Moderator: Juljan Krause, University of Southampton, Dissemination and Communications Manager, TheyBuyForYou

About the Speakers / Panelists:

Cécile Guasch: Cécile is a consultant giving support to the European Commission ISA2 programme around mainly two actions the Legal Interoperability action and the eProcurement action. Cécile contributes to several standardisation organisations in the procurement domain making the most of her previous experience in designing blocks of the procurement system for the European Commission.

Karolis Granickas, Open Contracting Partnership: Karolis leads OCP's programs in the EU & the Balkans. Before joining the Open Contracting Partnership, he contributed to global open data advocacy efforts, together with Transparency International Lithuania, the Epsi platform, Open Knowledge International, Open Data Institute and others.

Ian Makgill - Founder, openopps.com and spendnetwork.com: Ian has worked in public procurement for over 20 years and has been running his own businesses for over 12 years. He has founded https://openopps.com, the world’s first database of open, public sector tenders and the world’s largest Open Contracting Data Standard publisher. Ian also runs Spend Network, a service analysing UK government spending data. Prior to his career as an entrepreneur, Ian worked as a Management Consultant with a focus on government procurement. Ian has written and presented on the use of data to improve public procurement, he has a particular interest in using open data to combat fraud in public purchasing. Ian sat on the Cabinet Office’s Open Data User Group.

Prof. Oscar Corcho: Oscar Corcho is Full Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). He belongs to the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Informáticos, and co-leads the Ontology Engineering Group (OEG).

Till C. Lech: Till is a Senior Scientist with SINTEF Digital, one of Scandianvia's largest non-profit research and technology organisations. He is head of the Smart Data research group, active in national and international research and innovation projects in the field of data management, interoperability and digital platforms. Till is the coordinator of the TheyBuyForYou project, co-funded by the EC under the Horizon 2020 project.

Natalie Muric: Natalie Muric manages the Ontology Project at the Publications Office of the European Union. She has worked at the Publications Office for nearly 20 years and before that at the European Commission’s Directorate General Agriculture and Rural Development as well as Directorate general Employment and Social Affairs. Having worked as procurement officer, Natalie now coordinates the standardization of public procurement data within the Publications Office.

Natalie’s responsibilities include managing the eProcurement ontology project, which is funded by the ISA2 programme. The eProcurement ontology will provide a conceptual data model of the data relations across the procurement life cycle forming an important backbone when conceptualizing platforms, systems and data exchange.

The online services of the Publications Office include EUR-Lex which provides free access to European Law; the EU Open Data Portal, a single point of access to data from institutions and other bodies of the European; and TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) which publishes around 2700 public procurement notices daily from across Europe.