Exploitation and Merge of Information Sources for Public Procurement Improvement

Roberto Nai, Emilio Sulis, Paolo Pasteris, Mirko Giunta, Rosa Meo

Abstract: The analysis of big data on public procurement can improve the process of carrying out public tenders. The goal is to increase the quality and the correctness of the process, the efficiency of administrations, and reduce the time spent by economic operators and the costs of the public administrations. As a consequence, being able to recognize as early as possible if a public tender might contain some flaws, can enable a better relationship between the public organizations and the privates, and improve the economic conditions through the correct use of public funds. With the proliferation of e-procurement systems in the public sector, valuable and open information sources are available and can be accessed jointly. In particular, we consider the sentences published on the Italian Administrative Justice website and the Italian Anti-Corruption Authority database on public procurement. In this paper, we describe how to find connections between the procurement data and the appeals and how to exploit the resulting data for the measurement of litigation and clustering into communities the nodes representing entities having similar interests.