Status: concluded
Period: April 2015 – January 2018
Funding: 8.000 € in 2016, in-kind contributions in 2017
Funding organization: Cerved, Regesta S.r.l.
Person(s) in charge: Giuseppe Futia (Nexa Project Leader), Federico Morando, Alessio Melandri, Davide Allavena (Synapta)
Executive summary
In April 2015 the Nexa Center for Internet and Society has developed a service to represent and query procurement data of Italian Public Administrations (PAs). The service translates and publishes in Linked Open Data the XML files released by the Italian Public Sector bodies following the “anti-corruption” Act (L. 190/2012). From the beginning of 2016, the leadership of the project is passed to Synapta, the start-up on Linked Data founded by Federico Morando and Alessio Melandri. Nexa continues to work on the project with the contribution of Giuseppe Futia.
Background
The Italian “anti-corruption” Act (law n. 190/2012) requires all public administrations and some publicly owned companies to release open data about procurement contracts. Every public body is obliged to yearly release, on its public website, standardized XML files containing data describing all procurement contracts (e.g. bids to every tender notice, offers by companies and awarded contract details). A large amount of datasets are currently available concerning the last 5 years (2012-2016), from approximately 22.000 public bodies and public companies, including municipalities, universities, central government bodies, healthcare institutions.
Objectives
The ContrattiPubblici.org project aims at developing a framework for:
– verifying that all published procurement information is consistent with regulation;
– converting public procurement data into Linked Open Data, in order to overcome the fragmentation of existent datasets and allow easy analysis and reuse of information;
– linking contract data to other datasets, such as the national index of public administrations (SPCData currently available in RDF), DBpedia, and possibly the national business register (once it will be an open dataset);
– advanced data analysis through SPARQL queries (i.e., the total amount of contracts awarded without any tender with respect to location/city population);
– an easy human readable representation for end users, in order to increase the public awareness about public spending, improve transparency over the public procurement chain, help companies retrieve information about past tenders.
Results
To achieve the aforementioned goals Synapta and Nexa have continued to develop the software pipeline for the representation of Italian procurement data. The new GitHub repository of the project is available on the Synapta profile: https://github.com/synapta/public-contracts. In the first months of 2016, a data visualization on contracts of public administrations in Piedmont has been developed in collaboration with the Limpido design team: http://public-contracts.nexacenter.org/piemontevisualcontest2016/. The official website of the project is available at http://contrattipubblici.org.