LOTED: a semantic web portal for the management of tenders from the European Community

By Francesco Valle

Currently, the world of public procurement is dominated by static systems, like TED, which provide the users with very basic searching methods. In this way, the user is alone in looking for a convenient tender, and risks to miss the best ones.

Moreover, no one gives information about the distribution of tenders in relation to some parameters. There is no possibility to highlight differences between investments from different countries, regions in the same country, or other similar features.

The LOTED project tries to overcome these lacks using Semantic Web technologies, and giving also the opportunity to other people interested in linked-data about tenders to access its repository to take RDF serialized information.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Francesco Valle
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9791221309591

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ABSTRACT

Currently, the world of public procurement is dominated by static systems, like TED [2], which provide the users with very basic searching methods. In this way, the user is alone in looking for a convenient tender, and risks to miss the best ones.

Moreover, no one gives information about the distribution of tenders in relation to some parameters. There is no possibility to highlight differences between investments from different countries, regions in the same country, or other similar features.

The LOTED project tries to overcome these lacks using Semantic Web technologies, and giving also the opportunity to other people interested in linked-data about tenders to access its repository to take RDF serialized information.

In this text will be explained all the features created, from the daily updating of the system, to the statistical studies carried on, to the supporting tools implemented.

The LOTED system is an open source project [15].

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Procurement is defined from the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary as the process of getting supplies [1].

In the case of Public Procurement, institutions and government organizations carry on this process announcing competitions in which companies can call for tenders. So, through the creation of appropriated systems, it is possible to find the best agreement in terms of cost, quantity and quality, and, in the same time, guarantee the fairness of the contest.

One of these systems is TED (Tender Electronic Daily), a web portal dedicated to European public procurement [2].

1.1 Background: the TED system

TED is the official portal for the European public procurement, and provides free access to business opportunities. It is updated five times a week with approximately 1500 tenders from the European Union, the European Economic Area and beyond [2].

The TED system lets the user to move deftly between thousands of notices, choosing those ones that are more interesting for country, business sector, and other parameters.

The system also provides RSS feed (where RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication) as a tool to keep users informed by reporting the latest updates, as showed in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1: RSS feeds in the TED System

1.2 Tools used

The application has been realized in Java and is actually running on a Tomcat Server. More specifically, the technologies used are Java Servlet and Java Server Pages (JSP). The choise of the programming languages was due to necessities like stability and efficiency, fundamental characteristics for the system realized.

Figure 1.2: Tools used in the thesis

1.2.1 XML

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a metalanguage usually used to markup documents. It is famous for its simplicity, generality and usability over the Internet, and for these reasons, lots of languages XML-based have been developed [3].

One of these is RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a particular format used to publish information updating, as in the case of the TED system. One of the features of the LOTED Web portal is exactly the aggregation of these RSS feeds, and the consequent updating of the system with the new published tenders. (See Chapter 3)

Moreover, XML is also frequently used to represent structured data, as well as exchange them. In the LOTED system, XML has been employed also for the Ajax calls response, making simpler to analyze and reuse the results. (See Chapter 4)

1.2.2 OWL

OWL (Web Ontology Language) is a language to describe knowledge, used to write ontologies, explicit specifications of conceptualizations [4].

The final scope of OWL is