TheyBuyForYou

This project is an innovation action, meaning that the majority of work is focused on the implementation of novel approaches and technologies in the public procurement data accessibility and analysis. Website: https://theybuyforyou.eu/

The project’s original objective was to make the procurement processes in Europe more accessible. Throughout the project, we successfully developed technologies for the automatic collection and normalisation of tenders and awards data. This effort culminated in the creation of a comprehensive European Procurement Knowledge Graph, containing millions of detailed contract and tender data from various countries. To facilitate widespread access, we standardised the data in the OCDS format and engineered several tools for the analysis and visualisation of the collected data. Successful testing of these tools across various business cases validated their effectiveness and reliability.

We created an online toolkit to explore public spending and tender data in order to make public procurement more efficient and transparent. We developed an online anomaly detection platform that uses procurement data from the project’s Knowledge Graph and Slovenian financial transactions data that automatically identifies anomalies in both public tenders and financial transactions, contributing to a more transparent and efficient public procurement landscape.

Our platform integrates diverse data sources encompassing information on procurements and companies from various countries. This data undergoes an automated process of collection, normalisation, and storage within the TBFY Knowledge Graph. The compiled data is then imported into our anomaly detection platform where it is analysed and visualised.

The majority of data powering TBFY services is sourced through our partners, OpenOpps, which contributes procurement data that includes planning, tender, and award releases, and OpenCorporates, which provides comprehensive data on companies.

The TheyBuyForYou Platform offers a comprehensive suite of resources, including data (TBFY Knowledge Graph and Documents repository), schemas (TBFY ontology incorporating OCDS and euBusinessGraph ontologies), tools (Harvester, R4R for RESTful services, KG data ingestion pipeline, SPARQL GUI, and OptiqueVQS), and APIs (a set of core APIs developed or used in the project).

The data is published and openly licensed and accessible through a SPARQL endpoint, API, and as a data dump at http://data.tbfy.eu/. An online toolkit for anomaly detection is also available at http://tbfy.ijs.si/.

Additionally, the European Union Innovation Radar recognizes our project as an innovation, designating our organisation as a ‘Key Innovator’ in the development of this groundbreaking initiative.