The contracting party in Spain from the point of view of the reuse

The information regarding the purchases of services or supplies, or the information about public works contracts carried out by the administrations in the exercise of their competencies are probably two examples that do not generate a big debate regarding to what information should be publicly accessible and completely transparent to citizens.

In accordance with our legislation, we can find documents regarding to public tenders published in the procurement platforms (from the State and the autonomous Regions), in the official bulletins (national, regional and provincial) and, of course, in the contractor profiles of the different administrations and organizations subject to this obligation.

In 2013, the CORA (Commission for the Reform of Public Administrations) provided for a highly coherent measure: "the electronic publication in the Public Sector Contracting Platform of contracting parties by the entire public sector". This measure has increase over these years the amount of documents that can be located through this platform, previously dedicated primarily to the state public sector.

The new Law on Public Sector Contracts that becomes effective on March 2018 delve into this action line, introducing the obligation for all the contracting profiles to be published, in the Public Sector Contracting Platform or the platform enabled by the Autonomous Regions. In turn, the regional platforms could choose between publishing "the call for all bids and their results in the Public Sector Contracts Platform", directly or through interconnection.

As a consequence of the new law fulfillment, most of the public purchases announcements and the information related to their adjudications can be located through this platform.

However, as we all know, the fact that we can search, view and read documents one by one through a website does not mean that it is possible to reuse the documents data.

The legislator, certainly aware of this issue, introduces in the new law the obligation to publish all the information related to contracting party profiles and platform, using "open and reusable formats". This will contribute to increase transparency but also to promote a greater creation of useful value for society.

Now that many administrations are working to adapt their contracting profiles and platforms to new obligations, it is worth remembering that there are excellent examples in Spain of administrations that have been ahead of this obligation and have been publishing their bidding information for years, using open and reusable formats, and working together with the reuse community.

Just to mention some examples that can serve as inspiration and help to all size public administrations, we can mention regional platforms such as Basque Government or Government of Castilla y León, who support the reuse of their administrative contracting data since the moment they launch their open data initiatives. No less remarkable is the example of local entities such as City of Zaragoza which, in addition to betting on the highest technical standards for publication, has invested resources with other institutions to create and publish a public procurement ontology (PPROC) for linked data. Even at a smaller level we find small municipalities such as Lorca, where local government made a big geffort to publish contractor's profile information using open and reusable formats despite the scarcity of resources.

In summary, we have chosen to mention examples of public administrations with different size and resources, in order to illustrate that solving the new Public Sector Contracts Law challenges regarding the publication of open formats and reusable data is achievable by everyone. Of course, there are some other interesting examples, but the great opportunity is that, within a very short time, we cannot decide for any particular example as a consequence of the high standards of excellence in administrative contracting data publications in Spain.

Content prepared by Jose Luis Marín, Head of Corporate Technology Startegy en MADISON MK and Euroalert CEO.

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.