Enrich My Data
Creating a Pan-European Public Entities Register: Spend Network’s Data Enrichment Solutions
Press release
The EU-funded project, enRichMyData, develops an open software toolbox designed to streamline and democratise data enrichment pipelines across various industries. It is an integrated collection of interoperable tools and services supporting the entire lifecycle of data enrichment pipelines. By harnessing innovative technologies and infrastructure services, the toolbox empowers users to define highly scalable and replicable data enrichment pipelines with ease. Notably, it reduces the need for extensive expertise while enhancing support levels, thus democratising access to data enrichment processes.
To demonstrate its practical applicability, the enRichMyData toolbox is being applied to six diverse business cases spanning digital marketing, manufacturing, predictive maintenance, public procurement, innovation ecosystems, and mineral processing. Each case has detailed technical specifications aligned with specific key performance indicators, enabling the validation of the toolbox’s effectiveness across various domains.
Spend Network specialises in the collection, standardisation, and dissemination of procurement data on a global scale. It maintains the largest database of Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS) data, comprising over 180 million lines of information from more than 100 countries. This extensive dataset provides valuable insights into the $13 trillion USD global public procurement market, enabling transparency and accountability. Spend Network offers services to both public and private sectors, helping them to analyse procurement activities, ensure compliance, and foster market competitiveness.
Spend Network’s role in the EnRichMyData project involves leveraging its extensive procurement data expertise to create the European Register of Entities from Known Actions (EUREKA). The organisation will utilise its capabilities in data collection, standardisation, and reconciliation to build and maintain an open, comprehensive, and structured register of public bodies across Europe. This register will be designed to support various use cases, including government collaboration, private sector market analysis, and citizen engagement.
This initiative addresses the current lack of an open, structured, pan-European registry of public entities, which is critical for various stakeholders, including government departments, private companies, NGOs, and citizens. The primary goal is to use procurement data to identify, validate, and maintain an authoritative list of public entities, facilitating better cross-border collaboration, market analysis, and public accountability.
“I believe we can build a meaningful register of EU public entities and thus create a mechanism for classifying buyers and reconciling them with our database. Once reconciled, we will also be able to extract and enhance these records, for instance, we will be able to group all of the tenders that are being let by Universities across Europe. If we have URLs for these organisations we can further enhance the data with details of budgets or the number of employees. This in turn allows prospective suppliers to search for opportunities that more closely match their ambitions.”, explains Ian Makgill, Founder of Spend Network.
Spend Network’s existing procurement dataset will form the backbone of this register. The data will be enriched and validated using the enRichMyData toolbox, which includes tools for discovering new data sources (DiscoverR), extracting and profiling entity information (ProfilR), cleansing data (CleanR), linking records to existing datasets (LinkR), structuring data (StructR), and more. These tools will help ensure the data is accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date.
The EUREKA register will be accessible in two formats: an open access platform for NGOs, journalists, researchers, and citizens, and a commercial offering for private sector and public sector bodies. The commercial service will provide bulk data packages through APIs or CSV exports and business intelligence tool integrations. This dual approach will enable widespread use and ensure financial sustainability through revenue generation.
For more information about the enRichMyData project, please visit enRichMyData
Contact: Ian Makgill, Founder of Spend Network
About enRichMyData:
enRichMyData is a collaborative project funded by the European Commission aimed at developing a comprehensive toolbox for data enrichment pipelines. Through innovative tools and infrastructure services, enRichMyData seeks to democratise access to data enrichment processes and empower businesses across various sectors. enRichMyData is coordinated by SINTEF AS (Norway), one of Europe’s largest independent research organisations. The project partners include companies such as Phillips (Netherlands) and Bosch (Germany), dedicated to engineering and manufacturing; Spend Network (Estonia), a provider of procurement data; JOT Internet Media (Spain), a digital marketing company; CS Group (Romania), a software services company; Expert AI (Italy), a technology company specialised in natural language understanding; and Ontotext (Bulgaria), a semantic technology company. They will have the full support of the research partners that, in addition to SINTEF, include the University of Milano Bicocca (Italy), Jozef Stefan Institute (Slovenia), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), GATE Institute (Bulgaria), and BGRIMM Technology Group (China).
