Towards an Ontology for Public Procurement Based on the Open Contracting Data Standard

Abstract

The release of a growing amount of open procurement data led to various initiatives for harmonising the data being provided. Among others, the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) is highly relevant due to its high practical value and increasing traction. OCDS defines a common data model for publishing structured data throughout most of the stages of a contracting process. OCDS is document-oriented and focuses on packaging and delivering relevant data in an iterative and event-driven manner through a series of releases. Ontologies, beyond providing uniform access to heterogeneous procurement data, could enable integration with related data sets such as with supplier data for advanced analytics and insight extraction. Therefore, we developed an ontology, the “OCDS ontology”, by using OCDS’ main domain perspective and vocabulary, since it is an essential source of domain knowledge. In this paper, we provide an overview of the developed ontology.