TY - JOUR
T1 - TheyBuyForYou platform and knowledge graph
T2 - Expanding horizons in public procurement with open linked data
AU - Soylu, Ahmet
AU - Corcho, Oscar
AU - Elvesæter, Brian
AU - Badenes-Olmedo, Carlos
AU - Blount, Tom
AU - Yedro Martínez, Francisco
AU - Kovacic, Matej
AU - Posinkovic, Matej
AU - Makgill, Ian
AU - Taggart, Chris
AU - Simperl, Elena
AU - Lech, Till C.
AU - Roman, Dumitru
AU - Lehmann, Jens
N1 - Funding Information:
The work presented in this article was funded by the EC H2020 project TheyBuyForYou (grant 780247).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 - The authors. Published by IOS Press.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Public procurement is a large market affecting almost every organisation and individual; therefore, governments need to ensure its efficiency, transparency, and accountability, while creating healthy, competitive, and vibrant economies. In this context, open data initiatives and integration of data from multiple sources across national borders could transform the procurement market by such as lowering the barriers of entry for smaller suppliers and encouraging healthier competition, in particular by enabling cross-border bids. Increasingly more open data is published in the public sector; however, these are created and maintained in siloes and are not straightforward to reuse or maintain because of technical heterogeneity, lack of quality, insufficient metadata, or missing links to related domains. To this end, we developed an open linked data platform, called TheyBuyForYou, consisting of a set of modular APIs and ontologies to publish, curate, integrate, analyse, and visualise an EU-wide, cross-border, and cross-lingual procurement knowledge graph. We developed advanced tools and services on top of the knowledge graph for anomaly detection, cross-lingual document search, and data storytelling. This article describes the TheyBuyForYou platform and knowledge graph, reports their adoption by different stakeholders and challenges and experiences we went through while creating them, and demonstrates the usefulness of Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies for enhancing public procurement.
AB - Public procurement is a large market affecting almost every organisation and individual; therefore, governments need to ensure its efficiency, transparency, and accountability, while creating healthy, competitive, and vibrant economies. In this context, open data initiatives and integration of data from multiple sources across national borders could transform the procurement market by such as lowering the barriers of entry for smaller suppliers and encouraging healthier competition, in particular by enabling cross-border bids. Increasingly more open data is published in the public sector; however, these are created and maintained in siloes and are not straightforward to reuse or maintain because of technical heterogeneity, lack of quality, insufficient metadata, or missing links to related domains. To this end, we developed an open linked data platform, called TheyBuyForYou, consisting of a set of modular APIs and ontologies to publish, curate, integrate, analyse, and visualise an EU-wide, cross-border, and cross-lingual procurement knowledge graph. We developed advanced tools and services on top of the knowledge graph for anomaly detection, cross-lingual document search, and data storytelling. This article describes the TheyBuyForYou platform and knowledge graph, reports their adoption by different stakeholders and challenges and experiences we went through while creating them, and demonstrates the usefulness of Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies for enhancing public procurement.
KW - Knowledge graph
KW - Linked data
KW - Ontology
KW - Open data
KW - Public procurement
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85120784499&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3233/SW-210442
DO - 10.3233/SW-210442
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85120784499
SN - 1570-0844
VL - 13
SP - 265
EP - 291
JO - Semantic Web
JF - Semantic Web
IS - 2
ER -