My name is Ian Makgill and I am the founder of Spend Network.
What is the main activity area of your organization?
We aggregate public procurement data from across Europe and around the world. We use it to help suppliers bid on new tender opportunities and to analyse the procurement activities of governments around the world.
What are the challenges related to enRichMyData project and in particular to its toolbox that you face in your operations?
The data we receive is poorly structured and inconsistent, at the same time there is no known register of public sector entities across Europe, so we can’t reconcile buyers to a known list of organisations. Instead, we are using our data to build and manage our own list of organisations and then to link records to that list.
How does the adoption of the enRichMyData toolbox help you address these challenges?
We are trying to build links based on layered queries and validation that use multiple Large Language Models (LLMs), however, we can’t escape the need for human verification of our work. The EnRichMyData toolbox allows us to automate procedures to a point where they can be assessed by a human and then improves the workflow where humans are involved. It is vital to our success.
Which parts of the toolbox (tools and/or services) are you going to use and for what exactly?
We’re primarily interested in CleanR, LinkR, and StructR. We’re excited about the opportunity these tools will bring to our product and users. In particular, these tools have the capacity to industrialise the matching process at scale, allowing us to validate matches using automatic procedures and human evaluation.
What will be the benefits of the enRichMyData toolbox adoption: first – for your business area and second – for the end-users in your business area?
Based on the performance of early tests, 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 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.
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