EU Datathon 2022 teams behind the apps: Meet the AI-Team
_‘The teams behind the apps’ is a series of videos made by the EU
Datathon [https://data.europa.eu/en/news/op.europa.eu/eudatathon]__
finalists. Get to know this year’s teams and their apps over 12
episodes, twice per week, in the run-up to the competition finals. On
20 October 2022, the teams will pitch their apps to the jury that
will select the winners. The audience will also have a chance to
support their favourite team in the Public Choice Award vote. Register
now to follow the finals online!
[https://scic.ec.europa.eu/ew/register/dgscic/EU_Datathon_2022/e/lk/g/43770/k/]_

 

Tenders Electronic Daily (TED) [https://ted.europa.eu/] is the
European public procurement journal. TED publishes 676 000
procurement notices a year, including 258 000 calls for tenders which
are worth approximately EUR 670 billion. The AI-Team proposes
visualising TED data in a graph database and combining it with
ownership information and a list of sanctioned entities. This will
allow public officers and competing parties to trace the amounts and
values of awarded contracts all the way to the company owners. The
team behind this app – Christian Spindler, Thomas Wurster and
Stefan Fisches – joined us for a short interview in which we talked
about the app, the idea that led to its creation and why they decided
to participate in the EU Datathon.

 

HOW ARE YOU DOING WITH THE APP? WHAT’S THE STATUS?

Frontend and backend continue to grow. We have iterated through some
libraries and now have settled. We have meetings with possible user
groups to work out applications that support their daily use cases.
However, we found it hard to discover rich datasets and hard to know
where to begin with a query.

We aim to have four user groups and support their interests digitally:
interested EU citizens; companies new to public procurement;
contracting authorities supporting competition; politicians and public
authorities creating rules and regulations for a sustainable future.

Our app already combines external data from business registers and TED
data from the official portal for European data
[https://data.europa.eu/en]. During the last 4 months it has been
super interesting to see that a lot is currently happening with that
data in national governments in order to fulfil EU directives for open
access, and how much data has already been collected. This helps us
progress.

We also see that ensuring data consistency and combining the data to
discover interesting patterns still requires a lot of work or how we
tend to say ‘some sleepless nights’.

 

WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO TAKE PART IN THE EU DATATHON?

We wanted to do a project together for a long time and one night Chris
sent out a link to the Datathon. The four topics sounded very
interesting. Bringing more transparency to public procurement seemed
to touch on each of our areas of expertise, so we got started.

We are happy to see that an after-work project between friends is
turning into something really interesting and potentially impactful.
Honestly, we did not expect to get this far and it has motivated us to
push forward with our idea! We think it shows the power and the
importance of open data and open-source software. With the selection
for the finals approaching, the evening brainstorming turned into
late-night coding sessions.

 

WHAT MAKES YOUR APP SPECIAL?

Our app visualises, combines and filters publicly available data and
increases the transparency of assigned tenders, successful tenderers,
contracting authorities and contracting criteria. We then decided to
use maps (geographic and logical) to connect to the data and get
started with locations you already know and understand.

Our Graph Network allows users to digest complex correlations faster
and easier. The combination of TED database information with business
registers creates much greater value for users compared to Status Quo
in TED.

 

To find out more about the AI-Team, watch this 1-minute video.
[https://youtu.be/L2JEPkV3bbk]

Curious to learn more? Discover the teams and the apps on the EU
Datathon website [https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eudatathon], watch their
videos on YouTube
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jokN2NcsxCA&list=PLT5rARDev_rnik8jF6E8k5AjN5zeJmqXG]
and follow their updates on Twitter [https://twitter.com/EU_opendata],
Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/data.europa.eu] and LinkedIn
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/publications-office-of-the-european-union/]
or via our newsletter [https://data.europa.eu/en/newsletter].

Publication Date/Time
2022-09-27T05:00:00+00:00
Visualising data to improve transparency in public procurement